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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE BROADER VISION 




Richard Sill Holmes 



THE 

BROADER VISION 



BY 



RICHARD SILL HOLMES 




PHILADELPHIA 
THE WESTMINSTER PRESS 

1913 






COPYRIGHT, 1913 
BY MABEL D. HOLMES 



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•CI.A350735 



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Acknowledgments are due, for the material 
used in the making of this little book, to the editors 
of "The Continent," on whose pages many of the 
selections which make up the contents have ap- 
peared. The poems are fugitives, gathered from 
many sources, some few of them never having been 
published before. The short prose articles have all 
appeared as editorial material in the columns of 
" The Westminster " and of " The Continent.' 5 The 
little collection of Dr. Holmes's work has been 
prepared and edited by his daughter, at the 
request of many of his friends ; and is now pub- 
lished with the hope that in this way the influence 
of the [message that for forty years he preached, 
with tongue and with pen, may be made permanent 
and abiding. 

M. D. H. 



RICHARD SILL HOLMES 

1842-1912 

We may not crown him with weak words or laurel him with 

praise, 
Or know the greatness of his life in numbering of his days. 
'Tis not with line of eulogy we measure best his girth — 
"E'en as he trod that day to God so walked he from his birth.'* 

The beating of his heart is s.till> and yet his soul throbs on 
And trumpets us to victories, embattled, he has won. 
His laughter lilts upon our lips, his purpose nerves our hand, 
And visioned by his faith we press toward God's high prom- 
ised land. 

'Tis not for brave and golden words that we have loved him 

most, 
Or for those merited rewards the world delights to boast. 
His life rang true, in death he was not holden of the sod; 
For as he walked the paths of earth so fared he forth to God. 

Elliot Field 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Page 

The Story of a Full Life 1 

Life, Nature and the Spirit 

The Preacher 17 

A Saint 20 

Brass and Blue 23 

The Day of the Drone 26 

"What Do You Read, My Lord?" 30 

On Hallowed Ground 36 

Out of the City 38 

Cut Back 42 

The Edge of the Cliff 46 

Mountain to Shore 52 

Pendulums 58 

Grace . 64 

The Essential Creed 67 

Life 70 

Henry M. Stanley, D.C.L 73 

Wilfred T. Grenfell 75 

Samuel H. Hadley 77 

S. Grover Cleveland 78 

Some Reflections on the Death of a Poet 81 

God's Hero 84 

Inventory Making 89 

"Before the Rising of the Sun" ./ 93 

"How Shall We Keep Easter?" 96 

A Christmas Eve Revery 99 

The Great Gift 101 



X TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Page 
Life Lyrics 

A Spring Triad 107 

The Harbinger 108 

"The Great and Wide Sea" 109 

The Call of the Wild 112 

The Bungalow 113 

The Porch 114 

Posthumous 115 

Sweet Sixteen 116 

San Francisco Peaks 117 

Cambronne 118 

The Deserter 119 

Tree and Heart 121 

Primrose and Spring 122 

Per Contra 123 

The Guerdon 124 

Lost 125 

Contrasts 126 

Two Songs 127 

The Gate 128 

Compensation 129 

Self-Defeat 130 

Triumph 131 

Oblivion 132 

Immortality 132 

The Quest 133 

George William Knox 135 

The Rock of Ages 136 

My Prayer 137 

Calvary 138 

The Shrine 139 

Thou Drawest Me 140 

Aspiration 141 

Enoch 143 



TABLE OF CONTENTS xi 

Page 

Holiday and Anniversary Poems 

The Bird and the Morn 147 

On Easter Morning 148 

An Easter Hymn 149 

An Old Story 151 

Hail, Easter Morn! 153 

Whither Away? 154 

Decoration Day 156 

The Song of Liberty 158 

Old-Time Memories 161 

A Thanksgiving Hymn 163 

Christmas Morn 165 

Christmas Eve ■ . . 166 

For Christmas 167 

Night: Star: Child 170 

A Christmas Song 171 

Bells in the Night 173 

Light That Shall be 175 

One Hundred Years 176 

A Group of Sonnets .» 

Spring 181 

Summer 182 

Autumn 183 

Winter 184 

The Winter Trees 185 

Anemone 186 

Nightfall 187 

A Summer Night 188 

Eventide 189 

Mors — Lux 190 

The Guest Room 191 

The Watcher 192 

The Glen and the Shadow 193 



xii TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Page 

TheAngelus 194 

Self-Comprehension 195 

Liberty 196 

Love 197 

The Master Passion 198 

The Church 199 

Grace 200 

The Refuge 201 

Power and Love 202 

Samuel H. Hadley 203 

Julia Ward Howe 204 

Abraham Lincoln 205 

William C. Gray 206 

To-day's Bethlehem 207 

Nightfall 208 

Sparks from the Thought Anvil 

Antitheses and Analogies 211 

Old Sayings with Modern Meanings 214 

Kindling 216 

Sparks That Fly Upward 221 

Our Books 226 

Education 227 

Salvation by Inculcation ? 229 

No Thought for the Morrow: an Anti-Care Pre- 
scription 231 



THE BROADER VISION 



THE STORY OF A FULL LIFE 

The lives of some great men are memorable for 
outstanding achievements, rising like mountain 
peaks above the level plain of the everyday work 
of their lesser contemporaries. Other men, equally 
great, are so not by virtue of a few notable deeds, 
but by grace of the untiring energy, the vital faith, 
the lofty idealism which pack into one lifetime the 
accomplishment of two; of the fresh vigor of spirit 
which illuminates the common act with the light 
of the uncommon. Such a life has no mountain 
peaks, perhaps, towering above its level, though here 
and there may be a hill of attainment beyond that 
of the average soul. But everywhere the plain is 
aglow with the light of a radiant spirit; on its broad 
reaches the grass, watered by streams of loving- 
kindness, is green and fresh and ever young; along 
the path of each passer-by spring flowers of faith 
and joy, of peace and hope. What might have been 
a barren stretch of level sand is transformed into an 
Eden by the touch of the life that passed its sojourn 



2 THE BROADER VISION 

there. Such a life was and is the life of him who 
left as his legacy the message that this little volume 
brings. 

Richard Sill Holmes was born in Brooklyn, New 
York, on the sixth of July, 1842. Coming of good 
English stock, his ancestors in the direct line were 
among the earliest settlers of New England. His 
mother, Lucretia Frances Harris, was directly 
descended from John Haynes, the first colonial 
governor of Connecticut, and four direct ancestors 
fought in the American Revolution. The vigorous 
independence that characterized Dr. Holmes in 
both thought and act was his rightful inheritance 
from independent Puritan and Quaker forefathers. 
His father, Jacob Holmes, one of the brilliant lawyers 
of his day, and judge on the bench in Albany, 
bequeathed to his son the oratorical power which 
the son was to turn into a religious rather than a 
legal channel. 

The boyhood years of Dr. Holmes were spent in 
the village of Greenwich, New York, at that time 
known as "Union Village." Reared on simple lines, 
in a home where righteousness was the law, and 
where thought was open to every broadening in- 
fluence of those mid-century years, he was a lad 
at once studious and fun-loving. Those who are 
familiar with his writings know how deeply entered 
into his soul the impressions of the surroundings of 



STORY OF A FULL LIFE 3 

these early years; to the end his dearest memories 
seemed to gather about the scenes of the old home 
where he grew up. 

In March, 1859, he made his entrance into Middle- 
bury College in Vermont, across the state line from 
his home village. He has left a description of him- 
self as he was at that time: "A boy sixteen years 
old, small for his age, wearing a roundabout jacket 
buttoned with many brass buttons straight down 
from throat to waist. He had never been away 
from home alone before. His preparation for college 
was poor enough, consisting of abundant mathe- 
matics, some Latin, and but one page of the First 
Book of the 'Anabasis ' in Greek." Before his grad- 
uation in 1862, he had shown an amazing facility 
in the languages particularly, and for solid scholar- 
ship along every line stood second in a class of which 
he was the youngest member. 

Graduating at the age of twenty, he entered the 
field of teaching as his first activity, being instructor 
at Clinton, New York, and at Poughkeepsie, until 
the fall of 1865, when he entered Auburn Theologi- 
cal Seminary. The decision for the ministry was 
sudden, the result of a very distinct religious experi- 
ence, which came after a period of spiritual decline. 
Failure in health compelled him to abandon his 
theological studies, as he thought, forever; and to 
enter upon a business life in Auburn. The experi- 



4 THE BROADER VISION 

ence which he gained from secular touch with men 
for the next twenty-one years was the best possible 
education in the actual daily needs of everyday 
people. When finally God thrust him back into 
the ministry, he came to the work equipped as no 
theological seminary could have equipped him with 
a knowledge of human nature. 

Of the twenty years of his residence in Auburn, 
four were spent in mercantile life, eight as teacher 
of Latin in the Auburn High School, and six as 
a manufacturer. But the one interest which con- 
tinued throughout these changing phases of activity 
was his interest in the work of the Old First Church. 
Work in the Sunday school led him to be its success- 
ful superintendent for many years; his fine tenor 
voice made him an addition to the choir, where for 
eight years he was a valued singer; from local 
Y. M. C. A. work he came to be president of the New 
York State Y. M. C. A. in 1871. His interest in the 
seminary never flagged, and in 1873, when the insti- 
tution was in great need of an additional endow- 
ment, the young man, out of his limited salary as a 
teacher, contributed the thousand dollars which was 
the nucleus of a fund that his generosity inspired. 
Year after year he was reelected to the superin- 
tendency of the Sunday school, where his leadership 
was an inspiration. To the very end of his life, men 
and women who had felt the invigorating touch of 



STORY OF A FULL LIFE 5 

his strong personality in that capacity recalled with 
gratitude the work he did for them and for the 
church. Equally appreciative of the power of his 
life were those who had been his pupils in the high 
school, and at every return to Auburn in after years 
he would find friends among those whom he once 
had taught. But to find friends, in every phase of 
life which he touched, was for him the rule rather 
than the exception. 

In 1877 came the experience which was finally 
to lead Dr. Holmes back into the path that brought 
him to the ministry. It was in the summer of 1876 
that he went for the first time to the Chautauqua 
Assembly, then an experimental venture in its in- 
fancy. His genius as a student and interpreter of 
the Bible at once attracted the attention of Dr. 
John H. Vincent, the brilliant founder of an enter- 
prise whose influence was to be more widely spread 
than he or his collaborators dreamed. Before 
another year Dr. Vincent had made sure of the 
services of Dr. Holmes as one of the faculty of the 
Chautauqua summer school and as a leader of normal 
Bible classes. For ten years he was engaged in the 
Chautauqua work, lecturing and teaching the Bible 
on platforms far and wide throughout the United 
States, in summer assemblies north and south and 
west. Always in after years the memory of this 
period of his life filled a large place in his heart, 



6 THE BROADER VISION 

and reminiscences of the group of gifted men and 
women of whom he was one never lost their charm 
for him. Of them all, however, it was the personality 
of John H. Vincent that impressed itself most 
strongly upon the younger man, and it was his 
influence, as well as the reactive effect of platform 
work along religious lines, that turned Dr. Holmes's 
attention again to the ministry as the field 
offering the widest opportunity for the use of his 
powers. 

In 1884 he removed from Auburn to Plainfield, 
New Jersey, where he acted in the capacity of 
Registrar for the Chautauqua movement; and in 
1887, after an interval of more than two decades 
since leaving the seminary, during which time he 
had had no technical theological training, he passed 
his examinations for ordination to the ministry, and 
received a call to his first pastorate, in Warren, 
Pennsylvania. Seldom indeed does a man enter, 
after so long a period of suspension of theological 
study, upon the work of an active minister. Coming 
to the field in the prime of life, with intellect and 
judgment fully matured, with insight into the needs 
of men gained by long experience among men, and 
with the kind of loving sympathy that only comes 
by contact with one's fellows, it is not strange that 
Dr. Holmes was a powerful preacher and a successful 
pastor. 



STORY OF A FULL LIFE 7 

As he had won the admiration, the devotion, the 
love of pupils in the high school and the Sunday- 
school, of fellow-workers and of listeners in summer 
assemblies, and of those who came in touch with him 
in the life of every day, so now he gained the hearts 
of all those who came within his ministry. Many a 
man in that western Pennsylvania town remembers 
Richard S. Holmes as the friend and helper through 
whose leading he came to know the Saviour. In 
1890 he accepted a call to the Shadyside Church of 
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where — during a pasto- 
rate of fourteen years — he more than doubled the 
membership of the church and — what is far more 
worthy to be remembered than numerical success — 
won the devoted love of a united people. Not only 
as pastor but as friend, he lives in the memory of 
those who made his congregation during these fruit- 
ful years. It was in the year of his removal to Pitts- 
burgh that his own college recognized his gifts as a 
religious leader, and the brilliant pulpit power which 
continued to grow as long as he continued to preach, 
by conferring upon him the degree of Doctor of 
Divinity. Just ten years later, at the one hundredth 
anniversary of the founding of the college, Middle- 
bury added to the first degree that of Doctor of 
Laws. 

In addition to ministering to the needs of a con- 
stantly growing parish, Dr. Holmes took a prominent 



8 THE BROADER VISION 

place in the activities of his presbytery, and as time 
went on became more and more recognized as a 
vital force in the work of the church at large. Par- 
ticularly was he a strong helper in the cause of 
missions. In February, 1899, when, in spite of all 
efforts to lift the burden, the Board of Home Mis- 
sions found itself still $80,000 in debt, Dr. Holmes 
proffered his aid in an endeavor to extinguish this 
remainder before the next meeting of the General 
Assembly in that year. Dr. Charles L. Thompson 
writes: "At his suggestion a meeting was called, to 
which representative Presbyterians from seventeen 
cities were invited. With characteristic enthusiasm 
Dr. Holmes outlined a plan of operation, which was 
heartily adopted. He gave voice and pen to the 
work. In a few months, in large measure through 
his valiant aid, the debt was extinguished." Always 
afterwards there hung upon his office wall the 
framed telegram which announced the paying of the 
debt. "Two years later," says Dr. Thompson fur- 
ther, "the larger enterprise of canceling the debt on 
the Presbyterian building in New York was under- 
taken. Again the tireless energy of Dr. Holmes 
played an important part. By letters and personal 
appeals he was instrumental in securing a large share 
of the needed sum." 

In 1904 the increasing handicap of the deafness 
against which Dr. Holmes had struggled for many 



STORY OF A FULL LIFE 9 

years made it advisable for him to resign his pasto- 
rate in Pittsburgh. Removing to Philadelphia, he 
became the founder of "The Westminster," lineal 
descendant of the "Presbyterian Journal." What 
the paper was during the six years of its independent 
existence needs little further comment than the 
pages of this book suggest. Into this child of his 
brain he put his best powers of mind and heart; 
and the files of the paper are a monument to his 
indefatigable energy, brilliant genius, untiring per- 
sistence, and inventive originality. In 1910 the 
paper was united with "The Interior" of Chicago, 
to form "The Continent." What the pen of Dr. 
Holmes meant, in his relation as editor with that 
journal, can be best deduced from a perusal of the 
pages which follow this brief sketch. Suffice it to 
say that as his pupils and his parishioners alike had 
known and loved him best as friend of their hearts, 
so now his readers caught through his writings the 
gleam of his genial personality, and loved the man 
while they admired the editor. The same charm 
of intimacy made part of the attraction of the 
novels which, in his leisure moments, he found 
time to write during these years in the editorial 
chair. 

To attempt to suggest in mere words what were 
the character and the characteristics of a man whose 
measure lay not so much in what he did as in what 



10 THE BROADER VISION 

he was, is to discover anew the inadequacy of lan- 
guage. Many of those who knew him in his public 
capacity have paid tribute to his steady perseverance 
along any line of achievement which he undertook; 
to his untiring energy, that would let neither hands 
nor brain be idle; to the courage that surmounted 
obstacles and rose indomitable over barriers that 
would have daunted lesser men. Many have re- 
called his intensity of purpose and his fidelity in 
adherence to it. To talk with him about the things 
of the spirit was to come in touch with a breadth of 
view that took as the motto of its charitable tolerance 
the words, "No controversy"; and with a faith that, 
while it was vital and intelligent, was simple as a 
child's. One who questioned him as to his belief 
regarding the other world is fond of quoting his 
answer: "I don't know anything about it; but I 
do know this — whatever is on the other side, my 
business is to live so I'll have my share in it. I 
take no risks." Such a practical simplicity left 
no room for the speculation that so often raises 
earthborn clouds. 

But to those who knew him best, it was his genius 
as a friend that lingers most in memory. Every- 
where he went he drew friends to him. Children 
loved him; to his seniors in age he was full of the 
deference that yet does not relegate its recipient 
to the realm of the out-of-date. Among his con- 



STORY OF A FULL LIFE 11 

temporaries he was always a welcome comer. And 
the indomitable youth within him made all ages his 
contemporaries. At seventy, men of forty could 
stand with him on an equal footing of friendship, 
and at the same time feel the inspiring touch of 
the experience of mellow old age. For every life 
that came in touch with his he had a meaning. 
For every postman, elevator boy, and street-car 
conductor who served him he had a kindly word; 
these are among the number who remember him 
as their friend. Many readers of these pages can 
recall letters from him — cheery, genial, breathing 
the overflowing abundance of life that he shared so 
freely, almost always with a touch of the humor 
that could not be wholly repressed, even on the 
darkest day. Laughter was to him as the wine of 
life, and the ring of his hearty laugh would inspire 
good cheer in the gloomiest heart. 

The things of life were a never-ending joy to him. 
His editorials were redolent of wood and field, 
mountain and stream, the love of nature breathing 
through them like a perfume. No less keen an enjoy- 
ment did he find in human nature in all its phases. 
To walk with him down a city street or through 
a crowded store was to share with him the never- 
failing delight that the observation of city sights 
afforded him. The flash of his understanding and 
the readiness of his sympathy, responding quickly 



12 THE BROADER VISION 

to the mood of his companion, amused or grieved 
at the same causes, bridged the forty years that lay 
between him and the writer of these pages, until the 
two were as boy and girl together. It was perhaps 
this ability to take another's point of view, and to 
throw himself heart and soul into the projects and 
interests of another, that made much of this great 
gift of his for friendship. 

To speak of his friendship with the unseen and 
with God would be idle. His own words embody 
it. No higher tribute can be paid to any man than 
to say that he lived what he taught. The selections 
here reprinted represent the spirit of his message — 
high in its aspiration toward God, broad in its 
charity toward men, sympathetic in its interpreta- 
tion of nature and the heart, keen and often humor- 
ous in its observation of events and their meaning. 
No written words can hereafter be added to the 
message; but so golden a spirit cannot die. Poised, 
well-rounded, seasoned with laughter, softened by 
tears, his soul ripened into eternity. Looking into 
the west, he saw glowing there the glory of the 
sunset, a glory like that which crowns his memory. 
The aspiration of the poet who strove and suffered 
and achieved, and years ago passed on beyond the 
sunset, was granted to this saint of God who lives 
now in the invisible but present world. 



STORY OF A FULL LIFE 13 

"So be my passing! 
My task accomplished and the long day done, 
My wages taken, and in my heart 
Some late lark singing, 
Let me be gathered to the quiet west, 
The sundown splendid and serene, 
Death." 

Of that sundown the afterglow still lingers, not 
fading but abiding. 

Mabel Dodge Holmes. 



LIFE, NATURE AND THE SPIRIT 



THE PREACHER 

To preach must be in a man to begin with, or it 
is of no use for him to try. The schools will never 
put it there. They may bring it out into the open, 
stripped and girded like an athlete, or they may 
fetter it for a while with their rules. But if the 
power to preach is in a man, it will get out sometime. 

Preaching is a divine art, and there is nothing 
divine about the schools but their name. A divinity 
school may teach a man divinely, that is, after the 
manner of the great Master, but that will not make 
him preach divinely. A preacher is only a man. 
The man-clay of which God made us must have the 
divine image stamped on it, if it is to resemble things 
divine. The divine afflatus must have been breathed 
into the soul if it is ever to be breathed out; and if it 
ever has been breathed in, it will breathe itself out, 
sometime, somewhere. Expiration and inspiration 
must always be equal. 

A man thus inspired may never be in a pulpit. 
He does not always need a pulpit. No community 
may be wise enough to give him a pulpit. But he 
will preach. All men and all devils cannot keep 
him from preaching. Such a one never has to ques- 



18 THE BROADER VISION 

tion whether he has a call or not; he knows. God's 
message is in his soul. His cry is, "Let me get it 
out, or I die." His cry is, "Woe is me if I preach 
not the gospel!" 

If a preacher goes into the pulpit and never feels 
it cramping him, binding and limiting him, it may 
be that God called him to the ministry, but I doubt 
it. If a preacher ministers to a church so small, with 
audiences so thin, that he thinks it is not worth his 
while to spend his strength on them, it may be that 
God designed him for the ministry, but I doubt it. 
To the real preacher one hearer is as good as ten 
thousand. The preacher never knows conditions; 
never knows after he has begun to preach whether 
the congregation is large or small, whether the day 
is hot or cold; a crying child or a roll of thunder is 
as nothing to him when the divine impulse is on him. 
God has charged him with a message; he must 
deliver it; that is his only thought. 

There are sermon writers, plenty of them; sermon 
deliverers, plenty of them; speakers from notes, 
and speakers without notes. One can belong to 
either of these classes and not be a preacher. A 
preacher is a wind that rushes, roars, sweeps, drives 
over a landscape, and makes everything know that 
it has passed. A preacher is a bar of steel pulled 
from a forge where it has been heated to glistering 
whiteness. A preacher is a great white-capped wave 



THE PREACHER 19 

rolling in from the ocean, dashing over every oppos- 
ing thing that lies upon the shore. A man will 
never be a preacher who chooses the ministry from 
a sense of duty. He will never be a preacher if 
he chooses it because his parents dedicated him to 
God in childhood. The condition so imposed can be 
as well fulfilled by being a tinsmith. Let no man 
choose the ministry for a career, nor because he 
thinks it is about the most useful thing he can do. 
Let him not choose it at all. Let him be driven 
into the pulpit by God. Let him expect no pay 
in it, but rather crucifixion, and rejection by this 
world. But if it is in a man to preach; if he must 
preach, or go crying "Woe is me!"; if God is driving 
him to a pulpit, let him go; and whether it be in the 
way of the schools, or contrary to all the rules the 
schools have ever taught, let him preach the gospel 
to this sin-cursed world. 



20 THE BROADER VISION 



A SAINT 

She was never canonized by any church, nor did 
she need to be. Such an act might have helped the 
church that did it, but not her. "Called to be 
saints," Paul wrote in one of his letters to some such. 
There have been saints in every age since Christ by 
his blessedness made them possible. The Roman 
Catholic Church has adorned history with their 
names, and we are glad she has. To know who the 
saints were and what they did is good. The Prot- 
estant Church has had as many, but their names 
are not blazoned on cathedral walls. Our saint was 
one of these. 

To be a saint is easy after one has become one. 
But to become one — alas, one is not sanctified after 
the first day's trial. The Beulah land in which 
souls walk with God is a high table-land among the 
delectable mountains. To them John wrote: "Be- 
loved, now are we the sons of God." Of them 
Paul declared: "As many as are led by the Spirit 
of God, they are the sons of God." And no one 
becomes a son of God but by the bestowal of that 
love which John could not describe, but at which 
he marveled, crying: "Behold what manner of love." 
No one becomes a son of God but by the surrender 



A S A I NT 21 

that makes one willing to be led. Of such a one we 
write. For a son of God and a daughter of God are 
one. There is no sex in saintliness. 

What was her name? It might have been Cecilia, 
but it was not. It might have been Agnes, but it 
was not. Maiden, wife, mother, and widow, she 
was filial in her childhood, faithful as a wife, ten- 
derly loving as a mother, patient in her widow- 
hood. Sorrow only softened her; grief made her 
ever gentler; straitness did not narrow, but rather 
broadened her. Her days were days of beauty and 
of grace. We have known a man whom the Chinese 
in his city called "the man with the Jesus face." 
Our saint was a woman with the Jesus heart. She 
followed Christ; not at a distance, so far away that 
she could scarcely see him, but closely, and never 
with downcast eyes, but with radiant face and 
uplifted head. 

For such as she it is not death to die, nor is it 
life to live here. Birth, life, death, are but three 
steps from the unseen eternity out of which we come 
into the rest that remaineth for the people of God. 
Oh, how hollow are the plaudits which the world 
shouts for them whom it calls great, when they 
come into comparison with the "Well done" that 
affection whispers in the last hour into ears fast 
growing deaf to all earth's dreary noises. For "I 
heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, 



22 THE BROADER VISION 

Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord. Yes, 
saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; 
and their works do follow them." Blessed, too, are 
the living who live unto the Lord. Yea, saith the 
Spirit, that they may walk as I shall lead, and be- 
come meet for an inheritance with the saints in light. 
Who was she? A saint. Her name? No matter. 
She was our saint. You have one. Every com- 
munity has one. They are the lights of God burning 
on the shores of time to guide us to Christ. 



BRASS AND BLUE 23 



BRASS AND BLUE 

They were on a burly man who stood at a crowded 
street crossing in a great city. The brass was in 
buttons and the blue was in broadcloth. Authority 
was conspicuous in every action. There was a 
double car-line on the street, with frequent cars. 
Motors and carriages rolled swiftly toward the rail- 
way terminal at that corner. Drays and carts and 
loaded freight wagons clattered toward the freight 
houses, two blocks away. Foot passengers desirous 
to cross had tribulations, till brass and blue appeared. 

What power is in the burly man's finger! He 
stands, helmet-crowned, under the elevated railway 
whose station overhead darkens the crossing; he 
holds up a fat hand; he beckons with a finger that 
moves like the finger of a stuffed glove; and timid 
women and doubting men go scudding across in 
safety. Anon he waves his whole hand, and the 
throng on foot pauses, while cars and drays and 
moving four-wheelisms pass up and down the line 
of road. Then the reign of the finger begins again. 

We love brass and blue. We do not know his 
name, but he is the great city incarnate. He is 
the spirit of puissant law. No monarch more potent 
anywhere than that beckoning forefinger and waving 



24 THE BROADER VISION 

hand. In their realm they are absolute. Courts, 
counselors, and kings might learn wisdom from that 
burly man in brass and blue. That finger will never 
be impeached; it fears no bomb-thrower; yet its 
beck is equal to the voice of Czar or President. It 
is a spirit, a principle, a policy. It is the protection 
which a great city affords its citizens. It is a voice 
saying that peace, safety, happiness depend upon 
each citizen surrendering to all, and all to each, for 
just a moment a fraction of the citizen's inalien- 
able right. Pedestrians, pause a moment; for your 
patience you shall have peaceful transit. Carts, 
curb your clanging onrush for a little; for your 
courtesy you shall have your full chance. Cart 
and dray and wagon and motor have physical might 
on their side; they could easily run down brass and 
blue. They have right on their side, too. Were 
not the streets built for them to use? But up goes 
the fat finger, and they all stop. 

We are a law-abiding people. Even the president 
of the great corporation, who means to evade the 
law which restricts his corporation's greed for gain, 
will respect the law of individual right. He will not 
steal an apple from an apple-woman's stand. He 
will not go counter to the behests of brass and blue. 
Herein lies the promise of stability for the republic, 
in the fact that the common order of the day is 
honesty, not crime. Twenty-five thousand people 



BRASS AND BLUE 25 

pass brass and blue every day, and he does not make 
one arrest a week. He may have a club hanging 
at his belt, and a gun about him somewhere, but all 
we see is his potent finger, beckoning or pointing, 
or his eloquent restraining hand. If he has to club 
a man, or to draw his gun, it is in a calm, cold, law- 
governed way, and the throng has a new sense of 
security, after club or gun has reduced a fractious 
citizen to order. 

Here's to the perpetuity of the order of brass and 
blue! In reality it is we ourselves, acting for the 
conservation of the best interests of society. Here's 
to the health and happiness of the man who gets 
us all across the crowded, congested thoroughfare, 
standing as he must for hours at a time in one 
place, in all weathers, with finger beckoning or 
hand waving. Here's to American obedience to the 
insignia of law; here's to our innate intuitive regard 
for the externals of power. This is our sovereign; 
not the man in khaki, or in the full-dress of khaki 
wearer's commander, who drills sometimes and 
appears upon parade; but brass and blue — always 
with us, always ready to do a helpful thing, always 
entitled to our sympathy, our respect, and our 
regard. 



26 THE BROADER VISION 



THE DAY OF THE DRONE 

Inevitable. Escape from it is impossible. 
Hustle as you will, the hour will overtake you when 
you must succumb to the divine fiat. There is too 
much work to be done in after days, after months, 
after years, for you to try to cram it all into one 
day, one month, one year. The day of the drone 
will have its place. If you do not give it willingly, 
nature will force it in upon you. 

Rest is a world-controlling law as much as is 
work. The man who realizes that and obeys each 
law is wise. Angels are singing somewhere always; 
bright ones, fair ones. Stop beside life's weary 
road and listen. Hear the song? 'Tis but the 
soughing of the wind in the trees, you say? Yet 
is it one of the angel voices. We stop to hear the 
sound of its going in the tops of the trees, and in 
an instant rises the picture of the barefooted boy 
in the woodland on the home farm, following the 
cows gathered from the pasture behind the woods. 
We see him stop to listen to the melody breathed by 
the wind through big dark pines and sky-towering 
birches and sturdy hickories, and we forget time and 
place as we try to fit words to the music that will 
express our sense of rest and peace. It is the droning 



THE DAY OF THE DRONE 27 

hour, filled with the song that will lull the world to 
sleep. It is better to rest than to break. There is 
a drone in us all that must have his day. It is better 
to give it to him while health is unbroken, while 
strength is not lessened, while the heart beats nor- 
mally, while the nerves are unprostrated. 

Were the Sabbath absolutely kept as a resting 
time the drone would need fewer days. Were our 
hours of work shorter — or better, not so many in 
number (an hour cannot be shortened) — the drone 
would not be so vociferous in his demands. But 
men and women are much alike. To stop the 
machine seems impossible. Each of us is an autocar, 
self-driven along the vista of to-day, at a pace as 
swift as the engine, heart, and the engineer, will, can 
make it go. All of us think we can see far, far ahead 
at the vista's end a gate marked "by and by." 
There is the spot where we will let the drone become 
director, we think. Oh, the pity of it! The road 
from the "now" to the "by and by" is strewn with 
wrecks; broken machines, frustrated hopes, defeated 
purposes, unrealized dreams, fatuous ambitions. 
For one who passes the gate a thousand lie dead 
along the way. 

Give the drone his day. Do less, that you may 
do more. Waste a few moments every day rather 
than waste yourself wholly. No matter how full of 
demands your vocation, say nay to them and have 



28 THE BROADER VISION 

a vacation. Vacate your office, your shop, your 
study, your home, yourself. Send self off to the 
lakes, the sea, the mountains, the woods, the country 
farmhouse. Give the drone his day. 

In the shadow of a great rock lies a man. His 
rolled-up coat makes his pillow. The morning sun 
is hot, but he is sheltered in the shadow. Above 
him, far up above him, float the airships, wingless, 
untillered, moisture laden, graceful, fleecy, silver- 
gray r new miracles hourly of divine beauty. They 
will never fall and dash to death their hapless drivers. 
Our drone watches, and dreams waking dreams. 
You pass him with a cheery "Hello!" and stopping 
ask, "What are you going to do to-day?" The 
lazy answer, punctuated with a yawn, comes back: 
"Do? Nothing. Just absolute, unmolested noth- 
ing." Then he turns over, crosses his arms on his 
coat pillow, and lies there in the shadow of the 
rock. Pass on. Never try to write it. Let it be 
in memory the unworded poem of "The Day of 
the Drone." 

The face that looked bloodless a month ago has 
taken on a little of the "done brown" look with 
which the hand that wields the sun-ray brush is 
skilled to color the cheek. "Sunburned," you say? 
Oh, no! That is not poetry, and all that a soul 
should know when the "day of the drone" has come, 
and one has gone to the land where "do" is a word 



THE DAY OF THE DRONE 29 

of an unknown language, is the delightful, dreamy, 
do-less, drowsy dynamic called poetry. 

To whomsoever is trying to do the duty of the 
drone in the "day of the drone," whether by shore of 
ocean, or lake, or river; whether in woodland glen 
or in wilderness camp, whether at some "Castle of 
Indolence" on mountain summit, or in some quiet 
farmhouse far from the whirl and the honk of the 
automobile, we say "Requiescas." While the time 
for doing nothing lasts, do nothing. Be a happy 
nonentity for a brief summer holiday. 

Remember the "day of the drone" and keep it 
drony. Many a day in the whirling world must be 
full of care, of intense activity, of manifold worries, 
of nagging perplexities. You need the "day of the 
drone" to prepare you for all those. Join the drone 
army. Its soldiers need never drill. They carry 
no weapons. All that they need is a shaded nook, 
a pillow, and a book. 

A good, dull, prosy book is the best soporific 
tablet ever devised. Let politics go. Let the stock 
market go. Let life's miseries go. Keep your 
religion calm, sweet, true, but do not let it work 
too hard. Be a drone, a conscientious drone; but 
when the hour comes that being a drone becomes 
a burden, cease. Take yourself and your burden 
down from skyland Utopia and get into the current 
of life. In droneland there must be no burdens. 



30 THE BROADER VISION 



"WHAT DO YOU READ, MY LORD?" 

The question of Polonius to Hamlet is still of 
interest. Reading is a mind filler. The American 
morning habit is fixed. Breakfast and a newspaper 
are inseparable. The breakfast may contribute 
little to physical resources, but the man who must 
be in shop, office, mill, store or other fixed toil spot, 
or on his way there by eight o'clock, must have had 
breakfast before his start, or his toil machinery will 
not be in proper order. Likewise the newspaper 
may not furnish his mind with anything more 
nourishing than printed bacon and eggs and coffee, 
but the mind must have it, or there will be a feeling 
all day that a cog has slipped somewhere in the 
machine. The trip from the home in the alley or 
on the palace-lined thoroughfare to the working 
sections of town can be traced by thrown-down 
daily papers. 

Pass through a tram car, or the car of a suburban 
railway train, city bound, and glance at the open 
pages in the hands of the scanners of the downpour 
of the press storm of any morning. Some eyes are 
fixed on political cartoons; some on the columns of 
stock quotations; some on the results of the last 
day's ball games; some on the editorials. Some 



"what do you read?' 31 

hands are turning pages in a nervous way. Before 
your eye is a picture of American reading life. Re- 
trace your steps. Ask each reader the question 
from Hamlet and you may receive about the answer 
of Hamlet: "Words, words, words." They answer 
truly when to your question men reply: "Nothing. 
The paper contains nothing." 

Once in a half century there is a Titanic disaster; 
once or twice a Chicago fire; not oftener a San 
Francisco horror. The rest of life's daily happen- 
ings are only so many words. Great sheets of 
printed paper, and nothing making a mark on life. 
Papers enough are thrown away between New 
Orleans and Portland, Atlanta and Chicago, San 
Francisco and Halifax, every morning to blanket 
acres of prairie land, and the sum total of real im- 
pressions made on our national life could be put into 
the mow of a western farmer's barn. 

The man who yesterday was planning to secure 
at all hazards the presidential plum for a first, or 
second, or third time goes right on planning to-day, 
affected in no way by his morning paper. The 
stock jobber cudgels his almost worn-out brain to 
find new schemes by which to infuse new life into 
a dead-and-dreary stock market. The typewriter 
girls and underpaid clerks of both sexes flit, shuttle- 
like, from home to toil and from toil to what night 
may bring — excitement, pleasure, ennui, or sin. 



32 THE BROADER VISION 

What reading they may have done makes no more 
mark on the surface of their brains than the touch 
of a fly's foot on a window pane. 

Is it any wonder that, as a people that prides itself 
on knowing so much, we really know so little? We 
are not speaking of the scholars, the scientific men, 
the specialists, who, as a whole, are few measured 
against our one hundred millions of people, but of 
the everyday man and woman who plunge along 
from breakfast to bedtime without adding one new 
idea to their stock, be it great or small. What have 
all these read in the last three hundred and sixty-five 
days? Nothing. Who is the better for what they 
have read? No one. What great upward impulse 
has national life, or even private home life, received 
from the output of the American daily press to-day? 
None. What sort of crop will to-morrow reap from 
the sowing of nothing on the soil of life to-day? 

There has never been such an epoch of opportunity 
in the history of the world as is this of to-day. Peking 
and New York shake hands every morning. London 
and San Francisco say good night to each other with 
each sundown. The north pole and the south pole 
have nodded in recognition of acquaintance with 
each other after an eternity of isolation. The air 
talks to men and they hear the sound. There is 
not a place on earth where a man can hide. The 
heavens have revealed depths so remote that the 



C ( 



WHAT DO YOU READ?' 33 



figures which tell the story are beyond our compre- 
hension. And "yet there is no open vision." 

The pygmy financier spends himself making money 
and spending it in sums that make the rank and file 
of life stare and swear. Political parties look this 
way and that for men — colossal men, Abraham 
Lincoln men, Thomas Jefferson men, Daniel Webster 
men, Wendell Phillips men, William Wirt men, 
Henry Ward Beecher men, Horace Greeley men, 
Joseph Medill men, and cannot find them. In a 
newspaper age, in an every-man-reads age, where 
some curious Polonius asks, "What do you read, 
my lord?" our great lord, the multitudinous, break- 
fast-time reading public answers: "Words, words, 
words"; words unsuggestive of ideas — words jum- 
bled together by the hundred thousand by Swif tquill, 
the reporter, that bear no uplifting message to a 
soul; words that run into deeply worn brain paths 
that lead to nothing. 

The magazines are scarcely better. If they are 
strong, edited by men with a message of uplift for 
life and with purpose and power to give it utterance, 
they yet lie by the ton on the news stands at the end 
of a month unsold. They must be filled with sport- 
ing stories, with baseball attractions, with pictures 
of the Muggsys and Connies and Honuses who con- 
trol "the diamond." There is good literature on 
the news stands, but its cost condemns it when put 



34 THE BROADER VISION 

in competition with the Sunday morning offering 
of the great dailies. The before-quoted proverb, 
"Reading makes a full man," must be changed to 
read, "Newspaper reading makes a fool man." 
The "Daily Evening Squib," sold before ten o'clock 
in the morning, forces from the news stands by sheer 
"fizzical" energy "The Atlantic Monthly," which 
was once the mouthpiece of Thoreau and Lowell and 
Oliver Wendell Holmes and Alcott and Emerson. 

The shops of booksellers have shelves filled with 
the treasures of the ages, but in the windows given 
to advertising are novels, novels, novels. Melo- 
drama long ago drove the essay to the last place in 
the corner by the rear wall of the bookshop. Look 
over the shoulder of the pretty girl in the chair 
next you in the parlor car. You will find her read- 
ing "The Prodigal Judge." Who ever saw even a 
college girl reading "Sartor Resartus" or "The 
Diamond Necklace" on a railway train? Perhaps 
the title of "Diamond Necklace" might captivate 
her, but the reading of two pages of Carlyle's 
masterly vigor would condemn humor and satire 
and history to the limbo of the ash barrel. If the 
boy and girl readers of to-day become the fathers and 
mothers of to-morrow, what will their children read? 
Will they follow in the path of "Lydia Languish" 
and hide their books from the vigilant scrutiny of 
the Argus-eyed aunt when she appears? Abraham 



"what do you read?" 35 



Lincoln was made on the dirt floor of a log cabin 
by three great books — the Bible, Shakspere, and 
Blackstone. Are America's future Lincolns being 
so made to-day? 

The hour has struck for a new renaissance — a 
reading renaissance. Will the bell stroke be heard 
by America's reading millions? 

We heard the question asked recently: "Why was 
there no 'dark horse* run in the race for the presi- 
dential nominations?" The answer came without 
hesitation : " There are no * dark horses.' " Is it true? 
Have our "simple great ones gone forever and ever 
by?" What has produced the dearth? We have 
given the answer already. As a nation reads, so 
are its deeds, and we have become a people whose 
only reading is "words, words, words." 



36 THE BROADER VISION 



ON HALLOWED GROUND 

East Northfield is worth the cost of reaching it. 
The white houses, the green blinds, the spreading 
elms, the robust, stocky maples, the dark-green 
pines, the encircling hills, the distant Green Moun- 
tains, the hermit thrush, the flashing bobolink, the 
swinging oriole, all are abundant compensation for 
the journey hither. On Round Top, under a slender 
and low-foliaged birch, we sit in reverent silence. 
Only a few feet away is the spot where the body of 
one of earth's great men was laid, not many years 
ago. A few hundred feet farther, along the high- 
way, stands the house where the sleeper was born. 
The farm that was his home rolls away behind the 
house in lowland and upland, and one of its rollings 
is the mound, pine-shaded, maple-shaded, where 
Dwight Lyman Moody once was wont to speak 
"all the words of this Life" to men. There a stone 
now proclaims that "he that doeth the will of God 
abideth for ever." 

This is East Northfield. Here was born a man 
who had through all his life an unfaltering and 
unwavering trust in God. Here through the school 
year live four hundred and fifty girls, in an atmos- 
phere surcharged with the memory of a man who 



ON HALLOWED GROUND 37 

had unfaltering, unwavering trust in God. The 
conferences held here are spiritually unique. There 
is no higher criticism here; there are no vagaries. 
It is the place of a book, of an old book, of a God- 
given book. The atmosphere is one of spiritual 
religion. And perhaps the secret which differen- 
tiates this place from all others is the small green 
knoll where a gray stone stands in mute memorial 
of the man who was born here more than seventy 
years ago; who, while he lived, had unwavering and 
unfaltering trust in God, and who, being dead, yet 
abideth forever. 



38 THE BROADER VISION 



OUT OF THE CITY 

Out of the city : out of the hot, baking city. Out 
from between the rows of houses, brick and stone, 
whose walls pour forth upon the sweltering passer 
the heat which the sun has poured into them all 
day. Out from the noise, the soul-racking noise, 
of the trolley car; out from the heavy clatter of 
heavy carts rumbling over cobblestone pavements; 
out from the jostling crowd, and the odors that 
steam from open doors of noisy restaurants. Out 
from all this to the wide-open country; out under 
the trees, under the sky, into the air, and to some 
resting-spot on God's green turf. Out to an open 
porch across which the coolest of breezes blow, while 
the great forest trees, swaying in the wind, tell tales 
of rustic happiness which only one who knows tree 
language can understand. 

There are dreams on the porch. Life sat there one 
yesterday, not long ago, breathing deep draughts of 
health and peace, and the dreams came crowding: 
dreams of the old countryside and the vanished 
years; of the long lane that led from the farmyard 
down to the woods, and through them to the north 
pasture where the cows fed by day, or stood knee- 
deep in the pools of the brook, or slept under the 



OUT OF THE CITY 39 



spreading elms. There was the shepherd dog again 
trotting before, now chasing a wren and now a 
weasel, barking in glee at his sport, until the gate 
into the pasture behind the woods was opened, and 
he was told to go and bring the cows, while the 
barefooted boy sat on the top of the stone wall and 
watched the chipmunks until the collie brought 
the kine. Then came the long trudge back home 
again, shortened by the evening song of the red- 
breasted thrush. There, too, were the woodchucks 
out on the hillside nibbling the clover as the sun 
went down. And oh, those bobolinks ! swift-flashing 
poems of the meadow-land, swinging in rhythm, 
dropping melody from the tops of the tall timothy. 
There was the rye just ready to be cut. There were 
the long rows of corn that the hot days of early July 
were making shoot up to blossom and tassel as if 
by magic. Then when the cows were milked and 
the "chores" were done, there was the river, cool, 
deep, clear, as it lay in eddies under the banks; or 
sparkling, laughing at itself as it broke to spray over 
the reefs, the shaly out-cropping rocks that vainly 
tried to bar the way. 

There was the plunge into the old swimming-hole. 
And when the moon was full, and its silvery light 
danced in the rippling water, there was the long pull 
over the stretch of water below the falls. Sometimes 
there were other boats, and from the little flotilla 



40 THE BROADER VISION 

went out songs and laughter that was light and 
gleeful from the hearts of care-free girls, and one 
boy at least knew where there were bright eyes and 
a rosy face. Ah, those eyes, those faces! They 
have vanished long ago, and those years are far 
away. 

Filled with such reveries, life sat out on the porch 
in the cool green country. It did not sit alone. 
Its mysterious other part, that men call the soul, 
was life's companion, and though they said no word 
that other ears could hear, they held a converse 
that filled them both with peace. And the breezes 
of the summer night, laden now with laughter and 
now with jest and now with thought more sober 
and sedate, went by. Soul spoke at last to life. 
"Life, oh, Life, my dear companion, the pity that 
all this must end! To-morrow you must go back 
into the crowded streets, into the heat and bustle 
and turmoil of the world." 

But life made answer: "Peace, oh, soul! Let us 
not complain. Some day, by and by, we shall go 
out together into the great beyond, out of the stress 
of the world with its cares, out of the earth filled 
with the griefs of the ages, out of strife, out of hate, 
out of unrest, over the river into the great beyond. 
There is the stream, clear as crystal, flowing out from 
the throne of God. There is the tree of life. There 
is the great company which no man can number. 



OUT OF THE CITY 41 

There is no sun there by day, nor any heat, for the 
Lamb of God is the light of the city, and the nations 
of the saved walk in the peace and the beauty and 
the glory." 

Then answered the soul : " Yes, that is true. There 
are a few more days of toil, of burden, of trouble and 
of care, and then eternal peace." 



42 THE BROADER VISION 



CUT BACK 

" Sermons in stones; books in the running brooks"; 
teachers in trees. Twelve of these teachers in a row 
on one short city block. Apostolic number; and 
the first in the row a veritable apostle among trees. 
Battle-scarred veteran is he. The gypsy moth has 
attacked him year after year, and borers which no 
tree-doctor's knife has removed have eaten away 
at his bole and left him but little strength wherewith 
to stand. He and his comrades have suffered dis- 
cipline of late. The tree specialist passed along last 
winter, lopping off branches in what seemed reck- 
less, ignorant wastefulness. The row of trees stood 
cropped, clipped, cut back, looking like stumps with 
a few stiff sticks protruding from their tops. "They 
will be all right when summer comes," said the 
specialist. 

The battle-scarred warrior at the corner was an 
unsightly object. His wrecked bole was filled with 
cement; his branches were cut back, leaving two 
fork-tine limbs above the stump, two branches on 
one, one on the other. The eye could see no twigs, 
no bud-holding axils where new growth might come. 

March came with its bluster; April with its 
wooing moisture; leafy May; and lo! along the 



CUTBACK 43 



block is a row of shapely tops, covered with fluttering 
poplar and aspen foliage that hides the ugly awk- 
wardness left by the knife. Round, graceful, green, 
those trees are saying to every passer: "He knew. 
The man who gave us saw and knife and limitations 
and wrecked symmetry knew; and we rejoice." 

As for the old tree at the corner, his returning 
comeliness is a matter for another summer. But 
he has buckled to with the vigor left him, and at 
every spot where life had left him half a chance, he, 
too, rejoices in his fluttering leaves. And in their 
leafy voice a message comes to the listener. 

"You call life hard, do you? You lament because 
you are growing old? You grieve because the storms 
have twisted you, and the winds have broken your 
branches, and the gypsy moth has eaten at your 
freshness and beauty, and the borer has weakened 
your strong stand in the midst of surrounding life? 
You cry out because the Power with the pruning 
knife has cut you back? Look at me ! I, too, thought 
once that everything was against me. But day has 
broken again, even for me. Life returns with a 
fresher bloom, even to me. The stars from far away 
let fall their shimmering light, for me. Fanned by 
the breezes, kissed by the sunbeams, given to drink 
from those ever-full ewers, the clouds, my spirit 
longs to mount up on wings like the eagle that rises 
from the pine on the mountain crest." 



44 THE BROADER VISION 

As the leafy voice dies, the sweep of thought goes 
rushing on the track of the tree's lesson. Can life 
be all springtime? Can growth go on unchecked 
forever? Must it be that for us no lightnings shall 
flash in the sky, no thunders roll? Must pains 
never rack, because, forsooth, we like them not? 
Must the pruning knife never touch us? When we 
make growth that is too lush, that develops along 
one line alone, leaving other parts in our complex 
selves puny, weak, crippled, shall not the knife 
that cuts us back send its sharp pain into our hearts? 
He who is eternal, Creator and Ruler of a universe 
of whose immensity we as yet have but a hint, still 
finds time to watch the little twig upon the individual 
life tree, and cuts it back if it shows signs of growing 
as it should not. 

If there is life in the root, to cut back is only 
a challenge to a contest in which victory means 
renewed beauty. Over the life of George Matheson, 
when his "flickering torch" was yielded back to God, 
one might have written "Hopeless — cut back — 
ruined." But for George Matheson, cutting back 
was only the process by which he was made a shapely 
tree whose fluttering leaves have rejoiced the world. 
To real, throbbing life, God's disciplines, trials, 
privations, limitations, disappointments, are only 
preparations for a something of which it had not 
dreamed before. 



CUTBACK 45 



Who knows what the old, cut-back tree will do? 
Who knows what the cut-back life can do? "Who 
knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of man 
which is in him?" God is the pruner. He knows 
how and when and where to cut. Life may have 
its winter. It will also have its spring. And the 
life that has been most cut back may in its summer 
be covered over with fluttering leaves of graces, 
beauties, lovelinesses, which but for the prunings 
would never have been seen. 



46 THE BROADER VISION 



THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF 

Surprise was surpassed only by wonder. We 
had lost our way on a mountain tramp. At an un- 
marked point where the broad woods path parted 
like the top of a "Y" we turned the wrong way, 
and after a half hour found ourselves in a broad, 
dusty wagon road. There was no hint here that we 
were not tramping toward our destination, and to 
follow the road was easy. Through shaded vistas 
the yellow ribbon of road went, sometimes straight, 
sometimes tortuous, but always beautiful. An hour 
brought the end, for the road made a loop and wound 
back upon itself. To continue walking was to 
retrace our steps. 

A wide smooth rock sloped gently up from one 
side of the road and ended abruptly in a sharp line 
against the distant sky. The impulse to walk up 
that slope and lie flat on our backs in the morning 
sun was too strong to resist, and we followed the 
bent of impulse. Slowly we went up the slope, ten 
rods perhaps, twenty it may be, and then came the 
surprise which passed swiftly into all soul-filling 
wonder. 

What had seemed like a line against a far-off sky 
was the edge of a cliff. Sheer down went the line 



THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF 47 

of vision, a hundred feet, two hundred, five hun- 
dred, a thousand, to the valley below. An ocean of 
green lay there in forests sweeping away until forest 
ceased and meadow began, and the broad landscape 
stretched on and up toward other woodlands cov- 
ering the declivities of far-off hills. Through the 
valley, now gleaming in the sunlight, now hidden by 
its own high banks, ran a stream, unbroken by a fall. 
Smoke columns rising straight toward the sky, or 
curling in spirals as the wind currents caught them, 
told the story of farmhouses hidden by copses, and 
of a weary, long-houred workaday life of which the 
bulk of the city world knows nothing. 

Far away to the right loomed the masses of the 
Hudson river highlands. Through one gap in the 
distant environment glimmered a silvery sheen 
made by the waters of the great river of old Hendrik 
Hudson. Giving the eye farther sweep to the right 
brought into view the New Jersey uplands. Behind, 
directly behind, the gaze overlooked the forest 
through which we had passed and caught the view 
of distant ridges, piled ridge on ridge, ever higher 
and higher against the sky. 

We were the central figure of a world before un- 
known. No place that for covered head. The 
dominance of divine power was irresistible. One 
great sentence from life's commonplace book went 
reverberating from brain to heart, from heart to soul, 



48 THE BROADER VISION 

and so out into the vast outspread infinities: "Be 
still and know that I am God." How can a human 
soul come thus face to face with the All Soul of eter- 
nity and not be bent in reverential awe? The vast is 
so vast. How strange that through the little wicket 
gate of vision a scene surrounding one on every side 
for fifty miles can pass into a human soul. 

One who thinks can begin to realize why God is 
mindful of man. God's handiwork! How great it 
is! Yet it cannot comprehend man. It cannot in 
an instant enfold him, grasp him, measure him, 
remember him. But man at the center of his moun- 
tain-rimmed circle, a hundred miles across from edge 
to edge, turns slowly around and has the picture 
painted within him somewhere in colors that will 
never pale, and behind it all feels, what nothing else 
earthly can feel, the presence of God. 

On the edge of the cliff we seat ourselves to think. 
Did Jesus sit on such a spot as this when he saw all 
the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them? 
Was the great temptation only spiritual? What did 
the Carpenter of Nazareth know of the kingdoms of 
the world? Had he in boyhood climbed the heights 
of northern Palestine and seen entranced the hills 
and valleys of his native land? Had he beheld the 
long line of Jordan as it poured out from the Sea 
of Galilee and wound a way to its abnegation in the 
Sea of Sodom? Had he gazed far west at the Medi- 



THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF 49 

terranean over which the triremes of the world had 
passed when Greece fought Troy and Rome fought 
Carthage and its green waters were incarnadined by 
war? From the memory of such heights did there 
come to him visions, spiritual visions, of what it 
would mean to be the lord of the kingdoms of the 
world? 

That must have been a real temptation. Nazareth 
was limited. Poverty was grinding. His mother's 
words as to his destiny were always in his soul. 
The voice at the Jordan had named him "Son of 
God." Why live the limited life, endure the 
grinding wretchedness? Why not make his own 
destiny and make it now? If Son of God, why not 
be Son of God with power? Was the edge of the cliff 
thus danger-fraught to him? There is no record as 
to how in all this he suffered, except that it was 
temptation, and we know that when temptation is 
temptation it means suffering if we resist. But oh, 
the Man he was! "Get thee hence." That is the 
record, and the edge of the cliff became to him only 
a memory. 

Thought takes another turn as we look at the 
ragged confusion of broken rocks. Some he far 
down the perpendicular wall, heaped round its base. 
Some are caught in fissures lower down than we are 
sitting, yet high above the mountain's foot. On the 
great flat surface are striations that the scientific 



50 THE BROADER VISION 

man says were made by grinding ice floes in remote 
ages. Climb down the cliff in spots where you may 
amid the strata piled layer on layer, and now and then 
a gap between two layers, so wide at the face of the 
rock that one may crawl in as into the opening of a 
cave. But this is no gateway to hidden mysteries. 
Twenty feet in, the top and bottom edges of the two 
layers touch, showing that once they lay as parallel 
rocks. What tilted one and left the other? What 
uplifted this mighty mountain mass two thousand 
feet above the level of the sea, and from how many 
thousand feet below, who knows? 

Once more breathing through the stunted yellow 
pines comes the voice on the morning breeze: "Be 
still, and know that I am God." Our soul answers: 
"We hear; we obey." On the edge of the cliff is 
written in an alphabet which only devout reverence 
can read: "God hath made all things by the word of 
his power." What are our little years, our little 
centuries, our little longest ages? Nothing. Moses 
was right. "A thousand years as yesterday." 
What is our little world, our little solar system, our 
little universe to Him whose being, whose domain 
has neither a beginning nor an end? Nothing. Out 
into the infinite goes our soul as we sit on the edge of 
the cliff. A speck, we; that is all. But the speck, 
because made in his image, can follow from this rock 
fastness, this trace of his footprints in the vanished 



THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF 51 

eternities, to that spot hid from all earthly gaze 
where he reveals himself in love, even into the secret 
chamber of our own soul. 

We rise from the edge of the cliff and turn back- 
ward with the words of the One Hundred and 
Third Psalm ringing all through our being because 
of the lost trail and the new vision of the glory of 
God's world. 



52 THE BROADER VISION 



MOUNTAIN TO SHORE 

"Facius descensus" — so the Roman poet wrote 
ages ago. That was true in nature, science, and 
morals then, and is still. A brakeless vehicle on a 
mountain road has more than once found itself 
breakable. Memory tells us of a bicycle and its 
rider, sound and safe at the top of a hill on a country 
road, smashed and bruised at the bottom of the hill 
— the very Avernus of a hill. The aeroplanist is 
learning the lesson, but multitudes of victims to 
untoward, swift descent have not perceptibly les- 
sened the number of pupils in the school of heaven- 
tempting. Those old Babel men had a safer time 
in scaling heaven. The run down the grade also 
from integrity to utter vagabondage and moral 
brokenness can be, often is, swiftly made. 

This is the somber side of the "facilis descensus" 
proposition. There is, however, a brighter one. 
Coasting on snow crust in the winter, with good 
company, in well-manned, well-steered sleds, is as 
good as an automobile joy ride, and going down from 
high points of vision to the green pastures and still 
waters of valleys far below is full of delight as stage 
or touring car takes one smoothly from elevated 
laziness to the calling activities of a busy world. 



MOUNTAIN TO SHORE 53 



So our descent from mountain to shore on a recent 
day was easy, not, indeed, to an Avernus, but to a 
waiting pulpit in a city by the sea. In the morning 
we were eighteen hundred feet above tidewater. 
Twenty miles over to the northwest towered the 
crests of Rip Van Winkle's mountain bedroom. 
Between eye and mountain summit stretched the 
waveless ocean of green tops. Filling the lungs was 
the dustless, smokeless air. If such air were a liquid 
it would be for drinking the elixir of life. At night 
we were where the mountain streams which come out 
of hundreds of thousands of springs had found their 
last level in the wide rolling ocean. In the harbor 
were riding the hulks of ships from every part of the 
world. Along the coast line, east and south for 
hundreds of miles, were sprinkled the cottages and 
villas of multitudes seeking rest and escape from the 
torrid stretches of city avenues in the heated July 
days. 

Eighteen hundred feet down, but every drop of 
one hundred feet meant a rise of a half degree in the 
crystal tube where the mercury rises and falls; the 
telltale column by which the sweltering thousands 
in summer, the freezing thousands in winter, gauge 
their comfort or discomfort, their happiness or 
misery. Altitude down, temperature up. Seventy- 
nine degrees Fahrenheit in the mountains in the 
morning; ninety-two degrees at the shore when at 



54 THE BROADER VISION 

night we have reached it. The transit was easy. 
That was only a matter of horses and carriage 
wheels, of a locomotive and car wheels, but to 
balance the difference between seventy-nine and 
ninety-two was a different matter. 

To meet and keep a promise takes us down from 
mountain to shore. Moralists have said in varying 
form that the mere doing of duty is abundant and 
sufficient satisfaction to a soul. To keep a promise 
is to perform a duty, and one who does so virtuous a 
thing should, according to the moralist, be supremely 
happy. But we confess that eighteen hundred 
feet down and thirteen degrees up seemed a big 
price to pay for the fulfillment of duty, and as 
we realized, through the sleepless hours of that first 
night by the shore, how hot a hot night can be when 
the memory of the coolness of the night before in 
the mountains is fresh we shook our doubled fist at 
duty and cried in true Hamletian way: "A vaunt! 
and quit my sight." 

This little holiday, vacation day experience be- 
longs to the natural world and is inevitable. One 
must go down from idleness on the heights to the 
stern activities of the lowlands. Toil, stress, heat, 
duty, are all in the day's work, and he is indeed 
blessed who with steady hand and unceasing purpose 
does his day's work. There are fifty millions like 
him, as far as the call and the labor are concerned. 



MOUNTAIN TO SHORE 55 



The safety and perpetuity of the republic lie in the 
fact that half at least of those millions do with 
steady joy change the mountain for the shore day 
after day. 

There are millions with whom patriotism is a 
larger word than personality. 'Tis "Heigh ho, the 
wind and the rain" with the best bulk of American 
life. We will take what comes when it comes. If 
it is up to-day to ecstatic altitudes, good. Let the 
voice of ecstasy ring clear. If it is down to-morrow 
to heat-burned, murk-filled shore depressions, good. 
Let the hand of earnestness tug at the toughest toil 
till triumph comes. Only the craven yield to stress. 
Only the pampered submit to life's discomforts. 
The normal life takes what the day brings. The 
abnormal man moons over memories — a senti- 
mentalist who does not comprehend how sentiment 
may be a spur to drive one faster toward a distant 
goal, but that sentimentality is only a mushroom 
mooning. The value of the mountain is its inspira- 
tion for the hour of coping with the shore. 

The passers on the way of life make two mighty 
counter currents. One is a tide rising slowly up and 
up, bearing its freightage of individuality to heights 
of success, of wealth, of knowledge, of power, of 
self-conquest, and therefore of real ability to enjoy. 
The other is a stream moving steadily toward the 
ocean. Sometimes dashing down precipices victims 



56 THE BROADER VISION 

of self-ruin, sometimes whirling in eddies the debris 
of life, sometimes bearing along on its strong, even 
bosom purposeful energy returning to the rock and 
roll and sweep of the vast multitudinous life of 
the lowlands. Humanity going up; humanity going 
down. That is the story. From shore to mountain, 
when the hour for rest and recreation comes. From 
mountain to shore when duty calls, or work must be 
done, or a hand is wanted to underwrite life's ven- 
tures, or a voice is needed to sound with eloquence 
truth's propaganda. 

A life all mountain would be inane. A life all 
shore would land the world in a lunatic asylum. 
All anything is a misfortune. The Eskimo is an 
all high latitude man of heavy motion, of dull intel- 
lect, of narrow ideas, of few ideals. The tropical 
African is a baked man, a browned man, with charred 
brains and seared conscience and crinkled wits. 
The bleached man of the temperate zones, the man 
whose blood and passions are cooled, but yet who 
mingles in himself the least that is bad and the most 
that is good of hot and cold climates, is the one who 
has done the work of the world. 

Of course in this as in all things there are excep- 
tions to the rule. But they are exceptions. Shaks- 
pere has but one Othello. France has but one 
Dumas pere and one Dumas fits. America has not 
looked for her soldiers, poets, orators, statesmen, to 



MOUNTAIN TO SHORE 57 

the Arctic lands, nor to the Latin-American peoples 
about the southern shores of the Mexican gulf. We 
can play for a summer's day among icebergs, or for 
a winter hour under the palm trees; but for the work 
that counts, look to the peoples whose life in tem- 
perate regions carries them backward and forward 
between shore and mountain, and mountain and 
shore. 



58 THE BROADER VISION 



PENDULUMS 

The vast golden ball, time marker for unknown 
ages to vanished myriads of men, hangs low in the 
haze of the close of the midsummer days above 
the rolling outline of the hills. It is for the world 
the pendulum of the clock of infinite years. The 
watcher across the valleys sees the great orb go 
farther and ever farther southward down the moun- 
tain line as June becomes July, and July August, 
and August nears September. Sunset is a little 
earlier each night. Steadily lower and ever lower 
the pendulum swings, held by a rod invisible, that 
stretches out across the illimitable infinite to the 
grasping hand of God. Down it goes, carrying day 
away from us to the dwellers in another hemisphere, 
leaving for us the long winter nights, making us 
wrap in furs, making us set all the fires ablaze, 
making us count the days until the winter solstice 
comes and the swing southward over the mighty 
arc of space is ended. 

That long swing has added a half year to our lives. 
What mighty changes have come in the world 
while the celestial pendulum has last swung twice 
across its arc! An old empire dies. An old dynasty 
perishes. An old custom disappears. An emperor 



PENDULUMS 59 

passes away whose single life has directed more 
changes in his nation's life than had occurred, all 
combined, in a millennium. A new political party 
is created. The cross of Christ becomes more potent 
because of the lengthening of its shadow in Oriental 
lands. The sound of the events of the year, when 
all sounds are combined, is only one more tick of the 
clock of the ages that marks the steady oncoming of 
the rule of Jehovah over the world. 

So, as we watch the sunset this August night, we 
think of the steady certainty of the elemental con- 
ditions that make for purity and peace and power. 

There is a faint crescent just above the rim of 
the mountains to-night. It is the new moon. The 
thread of gold that marks the whole sphere, the 
thread reflected from the mirroring atmosphere of 
earth, is the prophecy of the full round of glory that 
will shine in a fortnight above the rim of the moun- 
tains to the east beyond the river. Across from 
west to east swings the moon. Downward, upward, 
from north to south and returning, oscillates the sun 
god. Only a month for the full forward and back- 
ward swing of the one; a whole year for the other. 

But the months of the month-maker, the moon 
(we should by right call it a "moonth"), are won- 
derful. June and early July bring the days of earth's 
laurel glory. These white gleaming wood spirits are 
themselves a pendulum. They float in, wafted 



60 THE BROADER VISION 

along by the morning and evening breeze of the 
mountains, called to radiance by the kiss of the warm 
sunlight, filtering down through o'erclouding foliage, 
and having poured their fragrance on the air for 
a time all too short, vanish. Whither? Perhaps 
through Homer's "horn gate of dreams." For 
dreams they are, matchless in beauty, simplicity 
and reality. Spirits of the mountains; caught by the 
sunlight and held captive until they have paid their 
tribute of beauty to the treasury of time. In and 
out, in and out, year after year, in dell, in glade, on 
rock-ridged banks of mountain lakes, in spots where 
no eye ever sees, they come and go; year after 
year spirits unstained by earth's contaminations. 

But the moon pendulum is no niggard in its dis- 
pensation of loveliness. Go out along the cliffs that 
overhang the valley on the east. You are above the 
tree tops now. Away the green sea of tree-top ver- 
dure spreads, filling one with longing for wing or 
foot, like bird or squirrel, to go flying, leaping from 
green tip to green tip, in wild happiness and perfect 
safety. When the story of the laurel has faded, the 
wonder of the tree- top sea begins. Over it suddenly 
is spread a silvery-yellow beauty, as if some goddess 
of the Titan age had cast a web of rare embroidery. 
Chestnut blossoms, of color indescribable, flame, 
flash in the light like dancing torches as the wind 
tosses the branches. Between the spots of mellow 



PENDULUMS 61 



light the dark, lush green of pine and oak and the 
tapering points of dark old firs. One must be on 
the mountain top to see this wonderful display. 
To look up from below is idle, unless one then gets 
up. It is the man with the alpenstock who sees the 
most divine beauties, earthly or spiritual, and never 
he with the muckrake. 

But the chestnut blossoms are pendulumic. They 
slip away as did the laurel wood nymphs. They 
slip away to bur and frost and chestnuts dropping, 
to bare limbs and winter iciness, while down below 
the earth the toiling roots rest in the grip of Boreas, 
the frost maker. Not dead. Oh, no! Resting. 
The moon will come and the moon will go, and one 
day she will wake them, and then there will be 
activity in the underground workshop. New colors 
for the decorations of a new year will be ground, 
and the tiny rootlet artists will spread them with 
infinite skill on new stem, new leaf, new blossom, 
and once more the joyful heart of man will cry out 
to the Maker of all: "Thou crownest the year with 
Thy goodness and Thy paths drop fatness." 

Walk over the mountain where the fire of the 
incendiary swept from foot to brow three years ago. 
It was a wonderful, terror-giving, heart-grieving, 
awe-inspiring sight. Beautiful, " with verdure clad," 
at night. Desolation enthroned on the mountain 
summit, hateful, appalling, when morning dawned. 



62 THE BROADER VISION 

Man can ruin, but such ruin man cannot repair. 
But the pendulums of the years swing steadily. 
Summer solstice, winter solstice, thrice repeated; 
August moon and its sequent sisters, year after year 
and year again — and lo ! a garment of green has 
overspread the desolation. And the tinting blue 
everywhere like the blue of heaven — is that reflected 
from the clouds? No! That is the color of the 
fruit of the year. Blueberries, ripe, luscious, invit- 
ing. The blue has come in with the August moon, 
and like the white of the radiant laurel and the 
yellow of the graceful chestnut bloom, it will follow 
the moon, swinging away across the arc of the 
season into eternity. 

With October will come the glory of the year. 
Time's swing is unerring. Once a twelvemonth 
regularly, through all ages past, through all ages to 
come, it has cried, it will cry: "See what I can do in 
death. I gave the fresh green beauty of the spring, 
the superb loveliness of the bloom of summer, now 
I will give the divine carnival of color, such as only 
the hand of God can paint." And maple and ash 
and oak and birch become the canvases at which an 
entranced humanity gazes in delight. And all the 
while amid the beauty of the dying glory of the year 
stand the dark pine and spruce and fir, unchanged, 
holding their wonderful coloring year after year the 
same, prophecy of an endless life. 



PENDULUMS 63 

For us the pendulum has ticked off the melody 
of the recurring years, has made us hear the nota- 
tion of the anthem of our earthly paradise. Do 
you remember what William Morris wrote? It is 
the synthesis of our picture of the year: 

Folk say a wizard to a northern king 
At Christmas time such wondrous things did show, 
That through one window men beheld the spring, 
And through another saw the summer glow, 
And through a third the fruited vines a-row, 
While all unheard, yet in its wonted way, 
Piped the shrill wind of that December day. 



64 THE BROADER VISION 



GRACE 

Grace is the conqueror of the world. Nothing 
is more beautiful in nature than that which possesses 
grace. The trees have it. We could never weary of 
watching the elms that overarch the streets of the 
New England town. Each new puff of wind sways 
them in various ways, entrancing because always 
changing and always lovely. The falling of a veil 
of water down the rocks of a mountain stream is 
graceful, with a grace differing from that of the 
trees, for it sings the sweetest of songs. The great 
birds sailing in wide circles high over the lakes or 
streams of our Adirondack lands are aerial weavers 
of invisible webs of graceful lines, and the eye of 
the beholder, never tiring, sweeps round and round 
with the birds. Deer, squirrel, trout in pool, swan 
on lake, vie with each other all unwittingly in their 
appeals to the human love of grace. A thousand 
things about us everywhere, animate and inanimate, 
have the wondrous quality. Blessed is the eye that 
sees it; thrice blessed is the heart that, noting it, 
thanks God. 

It is almost singular that this word which is so 
perfectly descriptive of all things lovely in the world 
should also be the word to name the most beautiful 



GRACE 65 

manifestation of God. Grace is Paul's great word 
for the richness and fullness which he had found in 
Christ; universal thought ascribes it equally to God. 
"Grace in God." "The grace of God." What is 
it? Ah, what is it not! It is love, and peace, and 
justice, and goodness, and mercy overflowing ever. 
It is the quality in God of which we can think and 
rejoice because it is beautiful. To get an idea of the 
love of God, we turn to ourselves; thinking we know 
what love is, we make it infinite, and call it the love 
of God. To get an idea of divine justice, we have 
to go to our own courts; we form ideas of what 
perfect human justice is, and make them infinite, 
calling that which we create in thought the justice of 
God. But not so with his grace. We do not have 
to turn to ourselves for that, for it is everywhere 
and in everything in nature. The quality which 
goes to make the most graceful thing your eyes have 
ever seen is in the character of God. His grace of 
character is like that of the waving elm, the fall- 
ing water, the sailing bird, the feeding deer, the per- 
fectly poised statue, the steady-moving steamer, 
the wonderful tones that swell from great organs, 
the hallowed light that fills with peace the kneel- 
ing worshiper in the cathedral cloister. All these 
things are in the character of God. God is infi- 
nitely beautiful; beautiful to contemplate, beautiful 
to worship, beautiful to praise. The grace of God 



66 THE BROADER VISION 

is upon us every day. The beauty of the Lord our 
God is upon us. Let us worship him in the grace 
which makes him beautiful in his holiness. 

Let our thanks rise. Let our hearts sing. Let 
our lips praise. Let our knees bend. Let our 
hands clasp. Let our voices hail him. Grace is 
ours. Beauty is ours. By grace are we saved. 
By the beauty of the character of God are we 
saved. 



THE ESSENTIAL GREED 67 



THE ESSENTIAL CREED 

There is nothing easier than to decry creed. 
There is nothing more impossible than to live with- 
out one. The very denial of creed is the expression 
of it. "I do not believe that Jesus Christ is the 
Son of God*' is the strongest sort of statement of 
belief that the whole Christian position is wrong. 
It is saying essentially: "I believe that Jesus Christ 
was a mistaken enthusiast who sacrificed a life of 
usefulness to an absurd whim, or else he was an 
impostor." The denial of creed positive is the 
assertion of creed negative. 

Negation must end in nescience. A positive 
philosophy of life, resting on the utterance of Simon 
Peter, "Thou art the Christ,' ' is better than denial 
which with a breath sweeps away the foundations 
of faith and substitutes nothing but vapid plati- 
tudes about a "creedless love" and other word-com- 
binations that mean nothing. "A creedless love." 
Was it that which sent Paul like a winged wheel 
through the world? Was it that which turned 
Peter back to Rome to die, if need be, for the Christ? 
Was it that which made John Calvin the strongest 
bulwark of human liberty that the world has ever 



68 THE BROADER VISION 

known? Was it that which made the band of exiles 
of 1620 moor their bark on a wild, inhospitable 
shore? The power that has done more than all 
combined forces in the universe to destroy the spirit 
of clan among men is the faith that, pure and 
unhampered, has believed in Jesus Christ as the 
Saviour of the world, the only equalizer and unifier 
of men. 

Creedless love, were such a thing possible, would 
make one more cult to be added to the many of the 
world, but different from almost any in the world in 
that it would be spineless. No spiritual osteopath 
could work to cure the ills by which such a cult might 
be vexed, because he would not be able to find a 
backbone in the whole anatomy of such a body. 
A creedless love can produce nothing stalwart. 
It has never sent a Paton into the islands of the 
South Sea, nor a Grenfell to battle with the rigors 
and terrors of Labrador, nor a Chinese Gordon 
to give his life for the redemption of an alien people 
from oppression. 

The creed which counts is faith in God as Father 
of our spirits, through Jesus Christ the Saviour of 
our souls. Life needs escape from sin; the way of 
escape is faith in God. Saul found it at Damascus, 
and the power of it in another at Paphos changed 
him from Saul of Tarsus into Paul of everywhere. 
It was good for that old Roman governor Paulus of 



THE ESSENTIAL GREED 69 

Cyprus to believe because of the sight of the power 
of God. It is far better for us to believe, because 
of love, not, indeed, that which is creedless, but 
that which is for him who died to save us from 
our sins. 



70 THE BROADER VISION 



LIFE 

Life is a mystery. Its springs are hidden in the 
secret chambers of God. Along what channel it 
emerges to action knows no human soul. By what 
path it retreats into invisibility is equally unrevealed. 
Its action is always the same, whether the means of 
its manifestation be the tiniest infusorial shell or the 
noblest exhibition of manhood. The life principle 
is one. Its negative we call death, and of it also 
we know nothing. No pen has ever defined life or 
death. 

The life is not the soul, though the Greeks used 
a single word for both concepts. The body dies; 
its life goes out. Soul and spirit live on unquench- 
able, not because they are the life, but because they 
and life are inseparable. Why does the body die? 
Why does a tree die? Is there a difference between 
the life of man and that of the tree? Is there a 
physical life essentially other than the spiritual life? 
Is animal life physical only? Has beast or bug only 
the same sort of life as the tree? When a man dies 
shall he live again? What dies? What goes when 
death comes? No eye sees either. "Bury me if you 
can catch me," said Socrates. 

Pondering life we are like children on the shore of 



LIFE 71 

the ocean, asking the age-long question of Paul 
Dombey. No eye has seen life, no ear heard its 
voice, no hand touched its form. And yet, like 
light, it surges about us multitudinously. 

Our lives in the religious view are twofold, inner 
and outer. The inner life in reality makes the 
outer, if, as Jesus says, the heart is the source of 
all actions. Does the outer life react? Does its 
influence pass inward to corrupt, or to ennoble, the 
inner springs of action? 

There are only two beings in the universe that 
know what any life is. One is the Ego in whom it is; 
the other is God. The tide of life ebbs and flows 
every day. It is an ocean whose shores have never 
been seen. Lives, as we call them, are its drops, 
and some are crystal clear, and some are muddy, 
and some are sweet, and others brackish, and others 
still, bitter and poison-filled; but the whole vast 
ocean is in God's all-holding power. 

The springs of the inner life should be pure. 
Only so will the outer life be true. But will the 
flow of the outer life be always pure if it flows from 
a pure spring? Will not streams from impure life 
around it flow into it and contaminate? Only in 
coloring its external activities. A spot may drop 
on the garment you wear, but it will not stain your 
soul. 

How comes real life to a soul? The answer has 



72 THE BROADER VISION 

never been written. Into the life of the world comes 
a human soul. Whence? No answer. How? No 
answer. So into the life that is eternal enters the 
spiritual being, we know not whence nor how. From 
a far country comes the wanderer. Dead yester- 
day, alive to-day. Lost yesterday, found to-day. So 
real life begins. 

Can the inner life fail? Not while it flows from 
the spring which is Christ. 

Will the outer life belie it? Not while Jesus 
remains true to his own achieved salvation. 

Is life a vapor? No. It is the aroma of a being 
pervaded with Christ. 



HENRY M. STANLEY 73 



HENRY M. STANLEY, D.C.L. 

The great explorer is dead. He was only sixty- 
three years old; but "whatsoever a man soweth" 
is true in the life of the explorer. Henry M. Stanley 
sowed hardship, exposure, nights in trenches, days 
on marches, labors herculean in the face of the hot 
breath of death-laden winds in tropic lands; sowed 
them over the whole area of his endowment and 
capacity before he was thirty-two, and the crop 
ripened and was reaped in a short life. But no 
man would have had the work that Stanley did 
left undone that thereby his earthly years might 
have been prolonged. For Stanley, sixty-three 
years was a long, long life; for life is measured 
not by years but by its dynamic outcome. 

Heart of oak, hand of Jove, eye of the eagle — 
that was Henry M. Stanley. Armed with the three 
characteristics essential to success — intrepidity, 
persistence, watchfulness — he went into the Dark 
Continent, crossed it, laid it open to the world, let 
heaven's light in on it, made bare its horrors, took 
away many of its terrors, aroused England against 
the enormity of the slave trade, made possible the 
foundation of the Congo Free State, did the first 



74 THE BROADER VISION 

things toward making it by and by a garden of the 
Lord. He was a mighty explorer. 

People say he had passed into obscurity in later 
years; that he had been left behind by the rushing 
world. Perhaps it is true, but we do not believe 
he thought of the fact often. He had done his work. 
To reach the heart of the Dark Continent was his 
goal and his reward. He found David Livingstone 
in those African recesses, and told to the world the 
story of the Scotch hero who had borne the cross of 
Christ from the Cape to the Equator. He found and 
brought out into the sunshine Emin Pasha, the fear- 
less German who was lost to the news-hunter of the 
world. He added discovery to discovery, and once 
and again astonished the world. Must a man keep 
on forever discovering and astonishing, because the 
gods have hearkened once and again to his prayer? 

Now the end has come. He has gone to explore, 
we had almost said a darker continent than ever 
his feet had trod before, so unknown to us is the 
land beyond the "great divide." The sable shadow 
from the wing of death clouded the approaches; 
the dark river flowed between him and the fields 
beyond; he went as always, straight on toward the 
end of the path his feet were set to walk. He will 
send no word back. Has he found Livingstone 
again, and Emin Pasha? We do not know. Henry 
Morton Stanley is dead. 



WILFRED T. GRENFELL 75 



WILFRED T. GRENFELL 

A small man with a great soul. Nights of broken 
rest are nothing to him. Plunges on his snow-barge 
over precipices into gulfs of snow are nothing to 
him. Crawling over ice-bound ways on knees and 
stomach for two miles to reach a human being in 
need of help is nothing to him. Small, swarthy, 
sinewy, smiling, is this Dr. Grenfell. In such 
lives God gives object lessons in this newest age of 
the world, instead of moral precepts in a book. 
"You have read books for a long time," God seems 
to say, "and have done little; read now some men 
of mine, and do as they." This is the age of the 
doers of the Word; among them, the Labrador 
physician stands preeminent. 

Who is this Dr. Grenfell who has swept into the 
religious life of America like a breeze from the 
desolate waste of ice-bound Labrador? An English 
physician, furnished for his profession by the best 
training London and Oxford can give. A gentleman, 
who might have lived among the elite; who might 
have spent his money in balls and parties and suppers 
to beautiful-featured women gathered out of Parisian 
pleasure-haunts; who might have given his genius 
to parading before his fellows as the best dressed 



76 THE BROADER VISION 

man in his city; who might have raced from Paris 
to Mentone in a big auto, making both dust and 
money fly; but who instead heard once a prophet's 
voice calling on Christian manhood to be something 
in this world worth while being, to do something in 
this world worth while doing, and who answered: 
"Thy servant hears." So is it that he is a physician 
practicing for no pay; a minister ministering for no 
money; a "promoter" procuring no profit for self; 
a skipper sailing along a snow-bound shore. So it 
is that hospitals have risen where two decades ago 
they were unknown; so it is that "the Docker" is 
a name to conjure with for hundreds of miles on 
Labrador. Great man, this small, plain English- 
man, fighting his battle with death and disease and 
dire need in the storms of an uncharted, iceberg- 
barriered coast, or in fog and snow and waste and 
wilderness, back from the shore in the wild, bleak 
interior, where snow-shoes and dog-train are his 
only means of travel, and where often his only 
companions are the high-up, silent stars. 

What made all this? The voice of D wight L. 
Moody, sinking into this man's heart, years ago. 
Truly, the prophet being dead yet speaketh. 



SAMUEL H. HADLEY 77 



SAMUEL H. HADLEY 

It is hard to realize that he is dead. Why God 
does such things we would not know if we could. 
To go about telling God's reasons would be too great 
a responsibility. Men die; that is the end for all. 
The bridge across time is shorter for some of us than 
for others. But that bridge is not piered on earth 
on one side and left with its other end hanging in 
mid-air. When we slip off from that other end we 
do not fall into the river of nothingness, to be swept 
to an ocean of oblivion. If we have been Christ's 
here, we step out and off upon the eternal prom- 
ises of God as to a home prepared for us by the 
Christ himself. It is thus that Hadley has gone 
to God. He had been a drunkard; he became 
a Christian. He had been a gambler; he became a 
Christian. He was never higher critic; never an 
apologist for worldliness and wealth- wearing wicked- 
ness; he was a Christian. "Oh, my poor bums!" 
was the cry as he passed. "Who will care for 
them? " We wish we could have been by to answer: 
"God!" 



78 THE BROADER VISION 



S. GROVER CLEVELAND 

It has always been diflicu 1 * to understand that 
sentiment in Mark Antony's speech over the dead 
body of Julius Caesar which runs: 

The evil that men do lives after them; 
The good is oft interred with their bones. 

That may have been the way in Rome's Golden 
Age, but it is not so now. The evil and the good 
both go on living and working after the doer is dead. 
But as far as memory goes, the world delights to 
remember the good that was in or that came out 
of a life, and it is supremely willing to forget the 
evil. Pulpit and press say the best things of every 
man for whom sounds the passing bell. So is it of 
that great American, Grover Cleveland, one of the 
remarkable personalities of the present age. 

He was a conspicuous illustration of the successful 
self-made man. Conservative and almost reaction- 
ary in intellectual character, he became master of 
men by the very elements which ordinarily bar the 
way to power. Sheriff of a county, mayor of a city, 
governor of a state, president of the republic — 
those were the successive steps by which he came 



S. GROVER CLEVELAND 79 



to great position and power. In executive adminis- 
tration no one ever charged him with being trickster 
or demagogue, whiffler or vacillator. His entire 
conception of government may have been wrong, 
but he himself believed it to be right, and he gave 
to it the whole devotion of his soul. 

He was never governed by impulse and never 
sought to dominate the branches of government 
associated with the executive. He represented that 
period of the republic which had been dominated 
by Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. He was an 
old-time Democrat who believed in the supremacy 
of the Constitution, and who was utterly opposed 
to centralization. He was born when Martin Van 
Buren was President, and came to manhood while 
the sentiment was being slowly developed in the 
nation which finally made possible the triumph of 
the idea that the republic is a nation and not a 
federation. 

He is the last of our old school of ex-presidents. 
None remains. For twelve years he has watched 
the trend of affairs in the nation. He has seen both 
Republican and Democratic parties depart abso- 
lutely from the principles on which in the middle 
years of our national life they have for the most part 
rested. He has lived in honorable quiet in the state 
of his birth, respected by all, and loved much by 
those who were nearest to him. He dies in a time 



80 THE BROADER VISION 

of transition and unrest. The great issue between 
the idea for which his life stood and the new ideas 
which are moving toward some concrete and unified 
position along socialistic lines is yet to be joined. 
The great conservative forces of the nation will 
draw together by and by, and when they do they can 
look to no more illustrious example of how to stand 
for truth than is shown by the life of America's one 
great and absolutely consistent representative of 
conservative statesmanship, Grover Cleveland. 



DEATH OF A POET 81 



SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE DEATH 
OF A POET 

The death of Richard Watson Gilder removed the 
last of the school of poets to which he belonged. 
There were not many of them. Sidney Lanier, 
Edward Rowland Sill, and Mr. Gilder were the 
greatest American representatives of a kind of 
poetry that is charming to read, interesting because 
of its relation to the working of the artistic mind, 
and inspiring because of its subtlety. No one can 
read the poems of Sill without being intellectually 
quickened. One who comes from communion with 
Lanier feels he has been in the presence of a cavalier 
of the noblest sort. Gilder, in a way, was both these. 
He was perhaps not the equal of either, and yet he 
surely belongs to the class of which they were the 
foremost examples. 

There can be no greater satisfaction than to turn 
from the care and turmoil of this tumultuous life 
of ours to a volume bearing the imprint of either of 
these men. They are like the stone to the dull knife. 
They are like warmth to the shivering body. Some- 
times they are like cold water to a thirsty soul. 
But, like the school that preceded them, this school 
seems to have had its last graduate, and he now has 



82 THE BROADER VISION 

passed on into the great beyond. The earlier day 
had notable men: Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, 
Lowell, Emerson, Bryant. Each was great, and 
each is gone. They left none to follow in their foot- 
steps, and a new school arose. What, now, will be 
the poetry of the future? 

Every man, every woman almost, at some time 
imagines that his tongue has been touched with the 
coal taken from the altar on which burns the divine 
fire of poetic genius. But rhythm is not poetry, 
nor is rhyme. Poetry is imagination, vivid, keen, 
daring, dressing old thought in new garb, daring to 
touch old pictures with fresh colors, and willing to 
fail often if once and again it realizes its own ideal. 

Horace was right in that often quoted epigram of 
his, and yet it is measurably true that that which 
makes great poetry is long devotion to the best 
ideals, and constant effort to realize its own unworded 
dreams. Here and there is a writer who will make 
a quatrain that charms, or a thought-laden sonnet, 
but they are few. Sometimes we think the best 
poetry of the present day is not in rhythmic form at 
all, and certainly is unrhymed. If the world can 
once come to recognize that that is real poetry which 
appeals at once to the imagination, the judgment, 
and the heart, no matter what may be its form, 
perhaps we shall at last be rid of much of the float- 
ing verse which is sometimes funny, often absurd, 



DEATH OF A POET 83 

occasionally catches the passing fancy, but which, 
on the whole, is a travesty. 

Who will be the great poet of the coming age? 
The greatest poetry was produced in the infancy of 
the race, when men ruled, when life was hard and 
limited, but when vast ideals, noble ideals, were 
forming in the souls of men. It is true, perhaps, that 
this age is too cultured, that it knows too much, that 
its resources are too great, that the very things which 
go to make life enjoyable to-day have strangled 
poetry. We rush after the material, we chase the 
ever elusive representative of wealth which we call a 
dollar, rolling away on its milled rim as fast as it 
can go across the uplands and lowlands of life; while 
we forget that there are nobler things than that for 
which wealth stands. / 

There will be no more great orators until there 
shall be a great crisis or epoch. There will be great 
investigators for all that is still to be made plain 
about the facts of life; but there will be no great 
preachers until there be a new vast sense of the 
immanence of God. There will be no great poets 
until the imagination be freed from its swathing 
bands and allowed to spread its wings and fly far 
upward to heights from which it can behold the 
broad vision of the world. 



84 THE BROADER VISION 



GOD'S HERO 

The last prose article written by Richard S. Holmes 
Printed September 5, 1912 

General William Booth — of him it is safe to 
write, as was written of Enoch ages ago: "He walked 
with God, and he was not, for God took him." 
"Dead," says the rushing world. "Not dead," 
makes answer a vast host which knows that this man 
was a spirit and that spirits never die. Greatest 
general of the last century — this soldier whose 
weapons were "not carnal, but mighty through God 
to the pulling down of strongholds." 

He is the largest spiritual force in England today. 
He will live potent when the king on the throne has 
been dead for a century. Edward VII is to-day only 
a name for one who was and is not. Victoria exer- 
cises no influence on the mo vements of Great Britain's 
political life. Embalmed by the redolent perfume 
of her own gracious life, she is yet only a memory. 
But William Booth lives. God filled him with a 
divine fire, that sort of fire which gleams and glows 
and warms, but does not consume. 

No founder of a great religious movement has died, 
not even when the religions have been pagan. 
Even the molders of forms of religious monstrosity 



god's hero 85 

wield influence still. Religion is an appeal to the 
human heart, and the life which can make the life 
of hundreds of thousands thrill to action at its touch 
has in it the seed of deathlessness. And when the 
religious impulse is beyond all question true, its 
power for good as years unfold is measureless. 

William Booth was not the founder of a new reli- 
gion, but his eye detected an undeveloped power in 
the masses around him. His hand struck a chord 
in the harp of his own heart, whose sound was 
unmatched by any he heard in British life, and he 
resolved to produce the tone which to his ear was 
music by striking that unstruck chord in the human 
life around him. For that he broke with his church; 
for that he, like his great Master, endured life's 
cross and bore its shame; for that he became poor, 
abjectly poor; for that he sought the multitudes in 
the lowest walks of life, and slowly found a following 
which he bound to himself by indissoluble bonds. 
Out of the depths his soul cried out to God, and from 
the heights, far-up glory heights, at last he praised 
him. Such men cannot die. John Fowler has never 
died, nor Huss, nor Luther, nor Calvin, nor Knox, 
nor Wesley. They cannot. They live because God 
lives. 

Twenty thousand criminals have been reclaimed 
and restored to usefulness and honesty through 
agencies General Booth set afoot in the forty-seven 



86 THE BROADER VISION 

years since 1865. Twenty thousand wrecked, world- 
despised profligate women have been led back from 
the depths of degradation into which they had fallen, 
having slipped and gone headlong on the slimy paths 
spread by the wickedness of men — led back from 
the gates of hell into a calm, pure, trustful life in 
Jesus Christ. That is record enough. Where is 
there a man in the great Methodist Church which 
expelled him from its bounds who can offer at the 
gate of glory, as tale for his life work, forty thousand 
saved souls? 

The church of the United States can do no better 
thing than pause and ponder. The great general 
built no magnificent churches. He lifted no heaven- 
pointing spires, raised no turreted battlements of 
church walls, emblazoned no magnificent stained 
glass windows, strove not to satisfy his soul by 
saying: "I have builded the finest, most costly 
churches in the United Kingdom and have filled 
them with millionaires." On the contrary the record 
of his life is as distinctly made as though it had been 
printed yesterday in the " London Times " : "I have 
shown the world how great is the power of a combina- 
tion of real religion and real charity." 

General William Booth mastered his life problem 
because he possessed three masterful qualities of life. 
He knew he possessed them and they never failed 
him. These qualities were earnestness, fidelity and 



god's hero 87 

courage. Only the earnest man earns. Circum- 
stance may drop plums into one's lap, but they are 
no interpretation of life. One may be born heir to 
vast fortune, but there is no certainty that it will 
be of service to him or anyone in the world. Fortune 
dropped no plums for this man. Instead she hurled 
stones, mud, sticks and offal at him in London 
streets. He was no money-maker. All above the 
mere cost of living went for the poor. 

But measure his life by his activities. Out on 
the record of its length and breadth and height will 
be written these three world-conquering vocables: 
"Earnestness, fidelity, courage." Prescience was his 
also. He saw the value of the "army" idea. If 
England's king had an army, why should not the 
King of kings have one? The uniform, the flag, 
the discipline, should be suggestive and complete. 
The red badge was not a copy of the old red coat 
of the grenadier, but of the blood of the cross. The 
test to which he put his soldiers, men and women, 
was severe. He met it first of all himself. To beat 
a drum in the crowded thoroughfare, to rattle a tam- 
bourine, to sing Salvation Army songs, to harangue 
a populace curious, hostile, full of ridicule, was not 
easy. He did it, and was so masterful that he made 
others do it. So the general lived, loved, wrought, 
wrote, toiled, triumphed. 

There are those who will say: "He was arbitrary, 



88 THE BROADER VISION 

imperious, dictatorial." So he was, but never 
capricious. He did what the world called unlovely 
things, but they were the workings of the stern 
discipline to which the old soldier had subjected his 
own soul. Essentially and fundamentally great, he 
did a greater life work than any man of his time, 
if work be measured by its far-reaching spiritual 
import. He wrought not for time but for eternity. 
He is gone, but his work remains. He is gone, 
but his life has not. That will go on and on while 
spiritual currents flow. He is gone, not because he 
is dead, but because he was the latter-day Enoch. 
"He walked with God, and he was not because God 
had taken him." 



INVENTORY MAKING 89 



INVENTORY MAKING 

December thirty-first — and inventory time once 
more. The busy world makes its annual review of 
the year's activities. Bought and sold, so much; 
assets, so much; a book value on the ledger, for or 
against, so much. The world will know where it 
stands, in a day or two. 

The firm, "Soul and Company," must also make 
its annual inventory. Soul is the head of the house; 
Body and Spirit are the partners. Soul is the re- 
sponsible one on whom the real burden of the firm 
rests; Body is the "hewer of wood and drawer of 
water"; while Spirit is the silent member who comes 
at times with suggestions of hope and sometimes 
in deep despair. Our clerks are many; Will and 
Desire and Resolve are active and prominent among 
them. Conscience is the bookkeeper's name, who 
comes now on this last night of the year to show the 
trial balance. 

Conscience is a good accountant. There is no 
need to check life's ledger through after this faith- 
ful servant, no matter how tremendous the debtor 
total may appear. Here are the entries of things 
daily received from the hand of God; the abundance 
received from friends; the vast values from social 



90 THE BROADER VISION 

relations; the revenues from unknown and unheard- 
of persons who by their daily toil contribute to the 
sum total of human welfare; the dividends from our 
general partnership in the business of humanity. 
Scanning the credit page, we blush; for the credit 
total is largely made up of promises to pay. We 
have given back value received, sometimes; we 
carried the load of poverty a little way for some one; 
we dropped the balm of consolation into a few hearts; 
we dried a tear on a child's face; we steadied a 
staggering man on his heart-broken way; we gave 
a little to the causes that the Church said were 
God's; but the bulk of our credit is in promises of 
what we will do by and by. This fills us with con- 
cern, for these things must appear as liabilities and 
our assets may not be enough to make good. 

One page in the ledger is headed "Life." Here 
are the entries; read them. 



'Dr. To 365 days steady continuance $100,000.00" 

1 Cr. By one dime, dropped 52 times in the church 

collection plate 5.20 

By resolve to pay the balance by a legacy to some 

college 99,994.80" 



We turn to our bookkeeper. "That, Conscience, is 
what we'll do when we die." Says Conscience: 
"Suppose you have not that much when you die?" 



INVENTORY MAKING 91 

It is a gruesome thought; we turn quickly to 
another page. It is headed "Health." 

"Dr. To 365 days of absolute freedom from the ills 

all flesh is heir to $100,000.00" 

" Cr. By a visit to the hospital to see our clerk, Con- 
science, whom we had sorely wounded by a 
dishonest deal in stocks; our time valued at . 100.00 

By promise to give all we made by the deal to 
widows and orphans, after we make as much 
more honestly 99,900.00" 

As we read we hear Conscience speaking, this time 
as though to himself: "Suppose you never make 
it?" A cold chill runs down our spinal cord, and 
we hurry on through the ledger's pages. 

The record is almost all the same. By the book 
showing of our assets and liabilities we are bankrupt, 
unless our inventory shows a large value in stock 
on hand. But we face the figures aghast. We are 
debtor to the grace of God for a sum we can never 
pay; against the debt stand promises we can never 
meet; ruin remediless is surely not far off. We 
have received everything; we have made of it — 
nothing. Conscience stands above us, no longer 
servant but master; we cower broken-hearted in the 
office of the counting-house of Soul and Company. 
"Close the doors," we cry at last; "let the ruin 
come!" 



92 THE BROADER VISION 

It is not the voice of Conscience that answers, 
but a gentler voice. "No!" is the word. "Let no 
ruin come! I will pay the debt, if I am but given 
entrance into the firm of Soul and Company. For 
stones I will bring iron; for iron I will bring bronze; 
for bronze I will bring silver; for silver, gold; for 
gold, diamonds; and thy poverty shall give place to 
my riches of righteousness. I am He that cometh 
with dyed garments from Bozrah, strong to bless and 
mighty to save." 

As we look up, half-fearfully, we see standing 
there the thorn-crowned Man of Calvary. We have 
met him oft before; long ago he made us offers of 
help. Then we turned from him in our strength 
and pride of heart. But now! 



RISING OF THE SUN 93 



"BEFORE THE RISING OF THE SUN" 

Night: midnight: still night, over the weary- 
city. In heaven's deep and dark blue vault the 
stars move on, steadily, silently, along their waveless, 
foamless way in the vast, unreachable, infinite space 
ocean. Here and there a flaring torch tells of some 
spot where memory of that awful yesterday keeps 
life awake to the fact of earth's horrors. Here and 
there hushed voices talk of the three crosses out on 
Calvary, and of the close-sealed tomb in the garden 
of Joseph of Arimathsea. Before that tomb, back 
and forth, forth and back, paces each way a Roman 
soldier. The two comrades who will relieve them 
at the next watch, sleep. The world sleeps; Rome 
sleeps; the provincial city sleeps; even hate sleeps; 
while within the tomb in the garden the Nazarene 
peasant sleeps. The high priest can rest secure. 
The peril is averted. The world that had gone 
after the "carpenter's son" can return to sanity. 
"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites," 
will sound no more when the multitudes walk in the 
holy porches of the temple. The Nazarene sleeps 
the long sleep in the garden without the city wall, 
and back and forth, forth and back, paces the 
Roman watch, that never sleeps. 



94 THE BROADER VISION 

The fourth watch comes. The cock's voice, 
clock for the coming day, strikes the hour before 
the dawning. From far below the world's rim the 
sunlight begins to draw its shining veil which will 
outshine the stars. Not day yet; it is still dark. 
A streak of gray is in the east. The weary soldiers 
note it, thinking the hour for their relief is nigh. 
The pearl color of nascent light spreads toward 
mid-heaven. The pacing sentinels wake suddenly 
to keen alertness; they feel earth rocking beneath 
their feet, trembling, heaving. They turn upon 
their beat; facing the tomb they see the great stone 
lift and sway and roll backward from the door, 
while light brighter than ten thousand suns floods 
all the scene. Dark Olivet with vine and olive tree 
shows in plain perspective against the curtaining 
east. The hill-bound city is visible, lying in its 
sleep, unconscious of the portents of the morning. 
And in the light that streams from the open tomb 
appears the sleeping peasant, emerging effulgent, 
triumphant, a spirit body, a bodiless spirit, a flash, 
a gleam, a terror to the soldiers' half-dazed souls. 
They fall as dead men to the ground. 

The world sleeps, but Jesus sleeps no more. The 
great city sleeps, but the city's rejected one sleeps 
no more. Rome sleeps, and its Caesar; King Herod 
sleeps; but the King of kings has waked to immor- 
tality. The peasant of Nazareth who was laid 



RISING OF THE SUN 95 

in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathsea to sleep the 
long sleep, has come forth, Lord of life, Victor over 
death and hell and the grave, holding in his hands 
the chains by which captivity is led captive forever- 
more. The Christ is risen. It is the Resurrection 
Day. 



96 THE BROADER VISION 



"HOW SHALL WE KEEP EASTER?" 

Very early in the morning yet; the darkness is 
too great to see the sepulcher. Is the stone rolled 
away? Yea — rolled away ! Angel messengers are 
by the open tomb. "Seek not to-day the living 
here." The outline of the hills grows plain. The 
pencil rays of sunlight color the eastern sky to glory. 
See, it is true. The grave has lost its victory. 
Rejoice, O soul! This is the resurrection morn. 
Let us keep the Easter Day. 

How shall we keep it? Bright lilies cannot keep 
it for us, though they can add their sweetness and 
beauty to our joy. Anthems and laudations ring- 
ing through nave and transept cannot keep it for us. 
To keep it as in the presence of Christ's triumphant 
glory is a thing of the individual heart. 

What wert thou, O Christ? How shall we keep 
thine Easter Day? Can you hear the answer? 
"I was a man. Keep Easter in memory of me, the 
man called Jesus." Without Jesus, the man, there 
could have been no resurrection. 

Yes, Jesus was a man. And what a man! How 
he walked the hills of Galilee. When sorrow called, 
how he replied. When calumny attacked, how he 
endured. When death seized him, how he died. 



KEEPING OF EASTER 97 

He died as man, unto sin, once. He lives in spite 
of death, triumphant evermore. Let us remember 
the man he was, as we rejoice to-day. Let us 
resolve to be such men as he. 

What wert thou, O Christ? "I was Christ, the 
King. Keep Easter, then, in memory of the King, 
without whom there would have been no resurrec- 
tion." 

Think of him as King. Not a crown-wearer, 
except as they crowned him with thorns. Not a 
sword-bearer: "Put up thy sword," he said to the 
over-zealous one. Could the Prince of Peace be a 
sword- wielder? No; nor the tenant of an earthly 
throne. But King of truth; King of love; King to 
whom the Father would give a name exalted above 
every name; King for human hearts to adore for 
the salvation which sanctifies. King of truth? Aye, 
King over himself. Had he not said: "I am the 
way, the truth, and the life"? And into abounding 
life he came on Easter Day: Jesus the Man; Jesus 
the King. 

What art thou, O Christ? "I am the Lord. 
Keep Easter, my Easter, in memory of me, the Lord 
of grace and glory. Without me there could have 
been no resurrection." 

The early church caught the word. Apostle, 
evangelist, the multitudes who accepted their gospel 
took up the formula, "The Lord Jesus Christ." He 



98 THE BROADER VISION 

was Jesus the Man, Christ the anointed King, and 
Lord triumphant evermore. 

Our thought goes back to the judgment hall of 
Pilate. The keen Roman saw Jesus for what he 
was as a man. To that manhood the Roman judge 
testified. "Behold the man," he said. There was 
a touch of pity there. To his kingship, though 
unintentionally, he bore witness. "Behold your 
king," he urged. There was a touch of scorn there. 
That the pale-faced, broken-hearted victim of human 
hate and sin who stood before him was the Lord of 
life and grace and glory never dawned on his pagan 
soul. 

What a Man — the flawless, spotless, sinless One 
of rolling ages ! And what a King — conqueror of 
death and hell and the grave ! And what a Lord — 
the glorious giver of all good for the perishing sons 
of men ! This is his resurrection day. Let us keep 
it in memory of Bethlehem and Calvary and the 
Arimathsean tomb. 



CHRISTMAS EVE REVERY 99 



A CHRISTMAS EVE REVERY 

Christ-child of the world's heart, Man for 
the world's redemption, Son of God with the power 
of the resurrection filling thee; this is thy hour. 
The heart longs for thee; the eyes wait for a sight 
of thy salvation, bringing joy into life; the bells of 
cathedrals chime the Noel melody; the world that 
knows thee looks thy way; and as the day draws 
nigh that bears thy name we can but think of the 
resounding voice of the angel host, and of the hasten- 
ing feet of the astonished shepherds, wending their 
way toward the manger and the Child. 

1 sit before the open fire in my boyhood's home. 
The hour draws nigh the birth of Christ. The 
world is white outside; the logs burn clear. The 
pencils of the flame paint pictures on the back- 
ground of my thought. There are shepherds sleep- 
ing; there are shepherds watching; there are 
shepherds going to see this thing which the Lord 
has made known unto them. Oh, shepherds, teach 
us your lesson! the lesson of your wondrous faith. 
Ye go to see — not to see if, but to see. And we 
reason and doubt and argue, and sometimes make 
utter shipwreck of our faith against the jagged 
headlands of a questioning brain. Simple shepherds ! 



100 THE BROADER VISION 

Believing shepherds! There were none to tell you 
that no such story could be true. The Devil was 
too much amazed that Christmas midnight to think 
of stopping you as ye went to Bethlehem to see. 
God had burst into life that night; the enemy was 
taken by surprise. He knew his hour had come for 
struggle, never to cease until the day came when he 
should slay the babe lying at peace in Bethlehem's 
manger. But never again could he get God out of 
the world; never again render hopeless man's 
struggle against sin; nevermore go unchecked in 
his hope-wrecking assaults on human souls. 

I see the manger now, on the flame canvas. I 
see the worshiping wastrels. I see the sweet-faced 
mother. I see the Child Jesus. And can I not see 
also the Holy Spirit, far above the baby form? He 
will descend some day, dovelike, and a voice will 
fill the ears of a man at the beginning of a great 
ministry with the marvelous words, "my beloved 
Son." I see it, I accept it all. I praise thee, 
Father of Love; and I worship thee, O Christ, 
thou Son of the everliving God. 



THE GREAT GIFT 101 



THE GREAT GIFT 

Gift of God! A human soul passed through the 
gates of life out of the vast unseen by the hand of 
the Eternal Jehovah. Gift to a poor, dying world. 
Gift for a sad, sinful world. Gift salvation-laden. 
Mighty load for a child to bear. They called his 
name Jesus. 

Were other children born that night so long ago? 
No angels sang for them over any of earth's uplands 
a divine anthem. Not one of them all is remembered 
anywhere to-day. But this child of Bethlehem has 
never been forgotten. He will, he can never be 
forgotten. The years, the months, the days of our 
present life are full of him. The day we celebrate 
is full of him. The voices of millions around the 
globe are full of him as they shout a "Merry 
Christmas ,, to their loved ones. For this baby that 
they named Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the 
living God. 

Does God watch with eagerness, think you, to 
see if on the Christmas Day any hearts will make 
his lovely gift their own? Can you see the face 
of the man who wept as he cried: "O Jerusalem! 
How often I would and ye would not!" That is 
the grown-up face of the baby of Bethlehem. Can 



102 THE BROADER VISION 

you hear the voice that gave the most gracious 
invitation of the world: "Come unto me all ye that 
labor"? That is the full man's voice of the little 
child who lay in the manger of Bethlehem, into whose 
face the wondering shepherds gazed. 

What came with Bethlehem's baby? Peace! 
The winged host sang it. Greatest song of time, 
and heard by humblest ears : "Peace on earth!" It 
comes ringing down the ages, and yet, under its 
sound, echoing from nation to nation, men have 
shed rivers of blood in war. "Peace on earth!" 
Yes! peace came with the Christ-child and peace 
was the legacy of the Christ-man when his last hour 
was upon him. "Peace I leave with you. My 
peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth, 
give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, 
neither let it be afraid." 

What came with Bethlehem's baby? Light! 
Light ineffable at midnight on Judsean hills. 
Prophecy was fulfilled there. Hear Isaiah's voice, 
exultant: "Arise! Shine! for thy light is come." 
Truly on Israel, decrepit, spiritually senile Israel, 
the glory of the Lord had risen. "The people that 
walked in darkness have seen a great light," comes 
the prophet's voice out of the past. Will the light 
be universal and enduring? Will it pale as other 
lights have paled? Climb to the heights to-day and 
scan the heavens. To the farthest limit of vision 



THE GREAT GIFT 103 

around the wide-belting, far-away horizon, the 
effulgence from the Bethlehem hour is shining; 
never brighter than to-day; never fuller of wonderful 
promise; never more illumining for longing eyes. 

What came with Bethlehem's baby? Immor- 
tality ! The hope of immortality was but a flickering 
torch. The cult which politically ruled in Christ's 
day said: "No resurrection, angel or spirit." In the 
Roman senate the greatest brain of his day had 
said, "Death is an eternal sleep." But all were 
wrong. On to life's end went the angel-heralded 
Child. Hate hanged him on a tree. Love buried 
him in a tomb. The power of his immortality 
burst the bands of darkness, and 

"Life immortal the Lord did bring 
From the seed that fell in an open tomb." 

Peace, light, immortality! Wonderful triplet of 
spiritual gems to set in the crown which that Christ- 
mas night placed on the brow of humanity. 

Salvation, too, came with the Bethlehem baby 
into the world. Is not salvation a part of peace and 
light and immortality? No; they are parts of it. 
It is the circling coronet in which the three gems 
blaze. Without salvation there can be no peace, no 
light, no immortality. 



LIFE LYRICS 



A SPRING TRIAD 107 



A SPRING TRIAD 

April 
No early night 

As in the winter days; 
No need of light. 

Now fall the long sun rays; 
Far through the meadows mark their shining way 
On winding river creeping toward the bay. 

May 
Let fall the seed! 

The waiting earth is warm. 
The cattle feed, 

Nor fear the chilling storm. 
With rod and reel the fisher beats the brook, 
Or rests at noontide in the shaded nook. 

June 
Soon o'er the fields 

Will wave the flaunting corn. 
The rich earth yields 

Her store for plenty's horn. 
Strong hands and hearts with sturdy nature cope, 
Upheld by memory of rewarded hope. 



108 THE BROADER VISION 



THE HARBINGER 

Floating, elusive, as on silent wing, 

The first fresh flush of the approaching spring. 

The ice-bank sheltered by the shadowing wall 
Feels the warm touch, and answers to the call. 

The crocus lifts its chalice to the light, 
Waked from the sleep of the long winter night. 

A spirit subtle as of noiseless dream, 

Or formless phantom, stirs sod, tree, and stream. 



GREAT AND WIDE SEA 109 



"THE GREAT AND WIDE SEA" 

Plash — 

Swish — How it rolls! 

Plash — flash — in the sun — 

Plash, swish, goes its sounding on and on. 

Not a rumble as of bowls 

On the alley, 

As one sends them with a spin, 

With the hope that one will win, 

As they strike the foremost pin, 

And the marker, in his marking, marks a "spare"; 

But swish, crish, plash, soft and low. 

It would lull a child to sleep, 

Make a lone heart cease to weep 

By its flow. 

See the lace of the foam, 

How it crawls! 

From the wave to the sand now it falls. 

There! 'Tis done! 

No — still again the watery walls 

Break in flashing silvery crests 

And roll in where the beach 

Stretches wide. 

And they fill the farthest reach 

As a troop from the hills fills a valley. 



110 THE BROADER VISION 

Swish, crish, plash, swells the tide. 

Yonder on their quests 

On the world's rim lazy ride 

Sails, in the sunlight shining fair. 

On the world's rim! 

What's below? 

Is it home? 

Who can tell? 

When a sail sinks out of sight, 

When a day drops into night, 

Does there gleam for each a light 

Anywhere? 

Oh, the rolling, restless wave, 

Never ceasing — 

Surging in, and in, and in, evermore. 

Now it flings its diamonds far, 

Answers now the gleaming star, 

Wheeling there 

In the high o'erarching dome. 

Far below is its deep, unfathomed cave, 

Naught releasing. 

Plash — flash — like a bell 

Hear it strike upon the shore. 

"lis the laughter of the waves, 

Silvery music, it may be, 

Or anon the ruthless roar 

Of the sweeping, raging, rolling, wrecking sea. 



GREAT AND WIDE SEA 111 



For the voice so low to-day 
With its plash and swish and swell, 
May to-morrow be a knell 
Over graves. 

Break, break, break, restless sea! 

Not thy dirge, but thy carol, sing for me. 



112 THE BROADER VISION 



THE CALL OF THE WILD 

To the autumn days, to the silvery lake, 

To the shelving shore where the light boat swings, 

To the fresh delight when at morn we wake, 

To a drink from the brook out of mountain springs. 

To the evening shade in the mountain glen, 
To the purple robe o'er the forests spread, 

To the tramp o'er the trail over moor and fen, 
To the rest at night on the moss bank's bed. 

To the vast woods' depths, to the leafy path, 
To the crackling fire when the day is done, 

To the touch of joy which nature hath, 
To watching the track where the deer must run. 



THE BUNGALOW 113 



THE BUNGALOW 

Hid in the woods, twin white birches for sentries, 

A spring just beyond at the foot of the rock. 
The eye does not see, but the sunlight finds entries 
Through the fluttering leaves, no noise in its knock. 
And the porches are cool, 
And the drink from the pool 
Is worth while. 



Climb up the high hill from the hot dusty street. 
The bungalow sits on the gray mountain ledge. 
From the sentries' high tops come voices that greet, 
Bird notes from the nest where the brown thrushes 
fledge. 
They are raindrops of song, 
Not too loud, not too long, 
Well worth while. 



Above, on the porch, stands the queen of the glade. 

The open door speaks of a welcome with joy. 
From the glare of the day to dark mountain shade 
Pass in, to a comfort that knows no alloy. 
For the bungalow's peace, 
Where life's worry will cease, 
Is worth while. 



114 THE BROADER VISION 



THE PORCH 

The porch is wide and the soft breeze is cool; 
A ripple laughs its way across the pool 
Where 'neath the lily pads the goldfish play, 
And from the fountain rains the silver spray, 
And the tall pines touched by the westering sun 
Cast shadows when the stress of day is done. 

And the beetle drones, 
And the swallow flies, 

And the dark pine moans, 
As the daylight dies. 



The porch is dark, when o'er her cloistered halls 
Night throws her veil, which like a mantle falls 
On weary life touched by the hand of care, 
Or bowed by burden which it needs must bear. 
Darkness, the path o'er which by hours are drawn 
Night's chariot wheels to gate of breaking dawn. 

And the night bird sings, 
And the glowworm gleams, 

And on noiseless wings 
Float the far star beams. 



POSTHUMOUS 115 



POSTHUMOUS 

The Censor read one stanza through; 

He shook his head; his lip he curled. 
"This poem? This? It will not do; 

I would not print it for the world. 

"No master ever made such verse; 

Its rhymes are poor, its thought is tame, 
Its rhythm bad, its diction worse, 

Its feet, its halting feet, are lame. 

"Who sent it? Has the chump no sense, 

To think he holds the poet's quill?" 
He turned the leaf. "From whom? From whence?" 

He read the name, "E. Rowland Sill." 



116 THE BROADER VISION 



SWEET SIXTEEN 
TO M.D.H. 

I watched a daisy as it raised its head 

After the winter, from its earthy bed : 

Its stem climbed ever upward toward the sky; 

Its blossom, like a face with upturned eye, 

Searched the far heavens to find the central flame, 

The sun, from which, day's eye, it takes its name. 

I've called you "daisy" in our dear home spot 
As years have sped; nor is my prayer forgot, 
This birthday morn, that you like this sweet flower, 
White-petaled, golden-hearted, know no hour 
Of separation from that light divine 
Which through the love of Jesus may be thine. 



SAN FRANCISCO PEAKS 117 



SAN FRANCISCO PEAKS 
FROM THE RIM OF THE CANYON 

Twin mountain peaks, snow-crowned; 
The desert spreading far, embrowned; 
God's silences profound. 

Like sentinels they stand, 
Alone, serene, and grand: 
They guard the silent land. 

Athwart the canyon walls 
Their silent shadow falls. 
Beneath, the river crawls. 

So, with the morn, the light, 
Rising from gloom of night, 
Bursts on our ravished sight. 
We kneel — : we pray. 



118 THE BROADER VISION 



CAMBRONNE 

He stood in the front of the battle line, 

Of the broken battle line. 

His comrades lay on the crimson field, 

On the redly crimsoned field. 

The cause was lost, but he gave no sign 

That his heart could ever yield. 

Alone he stood; of the "Old Guard" last, 
Of that staunch "Old Guard" the last. 
They cried him mercy, he cried back scorn, 
Yes, cried them back wrath and scorn. 
The fleeting moment of pity passed, 
By hate's tempest overborne. 

There was rain of death; there was leaden blast, 

The sting of the leaden blast. 

Still stood he scornful, still gave no sign 

Of yielding, no tokening sign. 

Alone, when the fiery breath had passed, 

The last of the battle line. 



THE DESERTER 119 



THE DESERTER 

Crack! 'Twas the rifles. 

When the smoke cleared away, 

There he lay, 

Mangled and dead. 

And the sod? It was red. 

"Shot for desertion," 

The orderly said. 

They found in his pocket 

A letter and locket. 

A child did the writing, 

"To dear Daddy, fighting." 

In the locket the face of a woman, 

Calm, strong, sweetly human. 

Said the letter, "Ma's dying; 

I can't write, for crying." 

He asked for a furlough — 

"A brief one, I pray." 

The answer was, "Nay." 

At roll call next day 

He was gone. 

"Start the chase! Bring him in 

Living or dead," 

The adjutant said. 



120 THE BROADER VISION 

He was caught and brought back. 

Brief report 

Made the court. 

"Of proof there's no lack. 

His sentence is death 

At sunset to-day." 

Boom! 'Twas the gun giving signal. 

When lifted its breath, 

There he lay, 

Mangled and dead. 

And the sod? It was red. 

"Shot for desertion," 

The orderly said. 



TREE AND HEART 121 



TREE AND HEART 

A leafless tree, and brown fields spreading wide; 
Sheep lying huddled in a sheltered nook, 
Where a great pine casts shadows o'er a brook, 

And cattle scattered on the bare hillside. 

The voice of Spring calls to the leafless tree, 
"Awake, and deck thee for the balmy days 
When o'er the grass-garbed fields the flocks will graze, 

And nature will rejoice, from rigors free." 

The answer comes in opening buds and flowers, 
In perfumes breathed upon the morning air, 
In petals sun-kissed into colors rare, 

And bird-songs at day's early dawning hour. 

So to my heart, 'neath sorrow lone and lorn, 
Comes the great call of Him who died and rose: 
"Awake, arise, forget what griefs oppose; 

Thy yoke is lighter than that I have borne." 



122 THE BROADER VISION 



PRIMROSE AND SPRING 

In humble garden plot a primrose grew. 

It blossomed; what more could a primrose do? 

An ice-cold spring burst from a wayside bank; 
A weary, thirsting traveler stooped and drank. 

A loving woman plucked the primrose bloom 
And bore it to a soul submerged in gloom. 

The ice-cold stream renewed the traveler's hope; 
He girt himself again with life to cope. 

The little primrose told of earthly love; 
The gloom-plunged soul lifted its eyes above. 

To waiting throng the hope-filled traveler trod, 
His message this: "Behold the Lamb of God!" 

Primrose and spring; how humble, yet how great! 
That soul is wise that learns ere yet too late. 



PERGONTRA 123 



PER CONTRA 

The boat that drifts upon the land-locked lake 
Which peaceful lies by beetling cliffs inheld, 
Needs no Thor's hammer ponderous chain to weld 

To give it mooring when the storm shall break. 

Rut craft storm-tossed on ocean's boisterous wave, 
Rattling the blast that sweeps the ravening main, 
Seeking the port and seeking oft in vain, 

May pray for Thor from ruin's wreck to save. 

The soul whose days are passed afar from strife 
In rustic quiet, or in forest glen, 
Needs not the panoply of armored men 

To ward the bolt by earth-stress hurled at life. 

But souls whose lot 'gainst whelming sin is cast, 
Whose only portion is to fight or die, 
May fix on strength divine a trustful eye, 

Assured of victory when the struggle's past. 



124 THE BROADER VISION 



THE GUERDON 

When the strong man, heavily burdened, 
Succumbs to the breaking strain; 

When after his strenuous struggle 
There is nothing left but pain; 

What better is he than the weakling 
Who has known nor loss, nor gain? 

Were the grave the end of the toiling, 
Life measured by strength alone, 

Had love no part in the problem, 
Were there not a Christ athrone, 

There were naught in living and moiling 
That could to such souls atone. 

But the grave is not goal but portal, 
And the burdened strong, who fell, 

Is better by all his strength had done 
Ere the sound of the passing bell, 

Than the weaker soul without loss or gain, 
To whom night calls no "All's well." 



LOST 125 



LOST 

Where is it? Who knows? 

'Twas here and 'tis gone. 
The human tide flows 

From first break of dawn, 
But no answer comes 

To the question we ask — 

Too great is the task. 

Life gave us a chance; 

We let it slip past. 
Mourn not, but advance; 

The future is vast. 
Christ's cry still is loud — 

"To the dead leave the dead.' 

No more need be said. 



126 THE BROADER VISION 



CONTRASTS 

The star is brightest when the moon has lost 
The flooding radiance of its parent sun. 

The heart is lightest when is paid the cost 
Of triumph over world allurements won. 

The star is guidon for the ship that braves 

In lonely nights the battling of the waves. 
The heart is nerved for struggle yet to be 
By every struggle crowned with victory. 

Contentment is a plant of growth so slow 
That expectation ofttimes waits in vain. 

Ambitions are like tempests fierce that blow 

Strewing their path with wreck, with loss, with pain. 

But for the soul that trustful runs its race, 

Pain, wreck, and loss are messengers of grace. 

And calm content, life's sweetest, kindliest flower, 
Will bloom, ere night brings in the closing hour. 



TWOSONGS 127 



TWO SONGS 

There is a song no mortal tongue can sing, 
A song whose notes are tuned to heaven-struck string, 
Far grander than the strains the earthborn hears, 
The ringing cadence of the distant spheres; 
They speed o'er paths by human foot untrod, 
The morning stars, the primal sons of God. 

But oh! the song that falls from lips of love, 
Far sweeter than all hymned by choirs above — 
The song of souls that erst have sinned, but turned 
With broken heart to Him whom once they spurned. 
That song is simple: "Oh, remember me 
When thou shalt come, dear Christ of Calvary." 



128 THE BROADER VISION 



THE GATE 

The years move slowly toward the distant goal, 
Which, reached, discloses to the longing soul 

The guerdon worth the toil through day, through night, 

The open gateway to God's radiant light. 
Though strait the gate, and narrow be the way, 
Enter, O soul! It leads to endless day. 



COMPENSATION 129 



COMPENSATION 

The flight of the arrow is swift 

When the hand on the bow is strong; 

The heaviest shadow will lift 

From the heart that is filled with song. 

And the way of peace is not hard to find, 

When Christ is the law of the willing mind. 

The path that the swift arrow makes 
Not the skilfullest hand can trace; 

The way that the dark shadow takes 
Is marked not by time nor by space. 

But the path of peace, by the Christ once trod, 

Begins in the heart, and it ends in God. 



130 THE BROADER VISION 



SELF-DEFEAT 

I shut my casement 'gainst the murky night. 
The morning dawned. The world was bathed in light. 
So, bent to shield my heart from pain and grief, 
I lost the joy that comes from pain's relief. 



TRIUMPH 

Let not the moil of time, nor stress of care 
Make in your heart the furrow of the share 

Of plow held by opposing hand of ill, 

Nor break the path straight marked by steadfast will. 
To stress of time oppose that grip of soul 
Which guides life's coursers to the destined goal. 



OBLIVION — IMMORTALITY 131 



OBLIVION 

If life be only the sequence of days, 
Now labor and pain, now censure or praise, 
Then speed to the goal where death shall disclose 
The end of the struggle, in endless repose. 



IMMORTALITY 

If life be the rood that measures love's power 
To comfort and bless, in sunshine or shower, 
Then measure each step to the Dark River's shore, 
Where death is the portal to love evermore. 



132 THE BROADER VISION 



THE QUEST 

To rest in sleep 
So calm, so deep, 
That all earth's noises could not wake, 
For me 
Would that be peace? 

From fouling moil, 
From wearing toil 
And thirst that no earth draught could slake, 
Set free, 
Would that be peace? 

Under the gleam 
Of rays that stream 
Down from far distant, rolling spheres, 
To walk, 
Would that be peace? 

On mountain crest 
With friend the best, 
In silence that can wake no fears, 
To talk, 
Would that be peace? 



THEQUEST 133 

Past toil, past sleep, 
Past cares that creep 
Into the soul, comes gentle voice — 
"For thee 
There may be peace. 

"At Calv'ry's cross 
Ends moil, ends loss. 
Look up, take heart, be strong, rejoice. 
For thee 
There may be peace." 



134 THE BROADER VISION 



GEORGE WILLIAM KNOX 

Died April 24, 1912, in Korea. 

Under Korean skies, 
Land hermited so long against the world, 
Land last of lands in which should be unfurled 

Christ's labarum, he dies, 

The Christian soldier dies; 

No duty left undone, 

Life's hardest conflict won. 
"In hoc signo" — let him who runneth read — 
" Vinces." 'Twill aye be true. 'Tis true indeed 

For him who peaceful lies 

Under Korean skies. 
Rests now the heart calm, trustful, and sincere, 
Who faced life's front unmoved by any fear, 

Quickly the roll call came; 

He answered to his name, 

Under Korean skies. 
"In hoc signo vinces" — so read the youth 
Christ's labarum. His manhood found it truth. 



THE ROCK OF AGES 135 



THE ROCK OF AGES 

I saw a soul, conscious of sin and loss, 
Storm-driven and racked; as ocean tempests toss 
The bits of flotsam strewed from wave to wave, 
And none in their tumultuous tossing save; 
As wind whirls in the chilling autumn days 
The sere dead leaves in hurrying, scurrying ways; 
As soughing winds by night through somber pines 
Sweep onward, while no star in heaven shines — 
So storm and rack drifted the unlit soul; 
Sin's yawning gulf before, its only goal. 

I saw a Rock upon the shores of time, 
Cleft, riven, and rugged; as its crest sublime 
A storm-hewn cross. Against it broke the tide 
Of hell, and hate, and sin, and God defied. 
Strong still it stood, unshaken mid the strife 
Of warring waves; sure refuge for the life 

That, struggling out of loss and wreck, should bring 
Thither its all, and to that fastness cling. 
Great Rock of Ages ! swept by surging roll 
Of swelling sin; great Headland for the soul! 



136 THE BROADER VISION 



MY PRAYER 

Jesus, let me look to thee! 

Dark is the way my feet must trace; 
Turn thou thy look of love on me, 

And let my sunshine be thy face. 

O Jesus, let me come to thee! 

Poor, weak, and tempted, prone to sin. 
Reach forth thine arms of strength to me, 

Heart of Love, and fold me in. 

Jesus, let me walk with thee! 

The way is long and I am lone; 
Extend thy guiding hand to me, 

And let thy footsteps lead my own. 

Jesus, let me rest in thee! 

Heart, head, and hand so weary grow. 
Thy yoke and burden give to me; 

Their ease, their lightness let me know. 

So, till the struggle ends in rest, 

Tarry thou with me, Saviour, Friend; 

So let me prove that soul is blest 
That, loving, loves thee to the end. 



CALVARY 137 



CALVARY 

Burdened by grief and tortured by sin 

I strove to find rest. 
Nothing without and nothing within 

Answered my quest. 
Then spoke the voice of the Christ to me : 
"Rest comes only from Calvary." 

Troubled in thought and captive to care 

I labored for peace. 
Naught I could do and naught I could dare 

Brought me release. 
Then came the voice of the Christ to me: 
"Peace comes only from Calvary." 

Sadly cast down, forsaken by hope, 

I cried in despair: 
"God, give me strength with trouble to cope!" 

This was my prayer. 
Answered the voice of the Christ to me: 
"Strength comes only from Calvary." 

Lifting my eyes and looking, I saw 

That hill of despair; 
Cross-topped it stood, and cursed by the law, 

But Jesus hung there; 
And his voice came clearer than erst to me: 
"Rest — peace — strength — come from Calvary." 



138 THE BROADER VISION 



THE SHRINE 

Love stopped by the foot of a wayside shrine, 

And Hate passed by. 
"Kneel'st not," said Love, "to thy God and mine?" 

"Not I; not I." 
Love knelt to pray, but she softly wept; 
Hate, fixed in purpose, her pathway kept. 

Love lifted her face to the shrine, and lo! 

The Christ was there; 
Hate followed the way she had marked to go, 

Without a prayer. 
The Christ touched Love's lips with a holy kiss, 
But Hate was lost in her own abyss. 

Love lives through her prayer; 
Hate dies from despair. 



THOU DRAWEST ME 139 



THOU DRAWEST ME 

Tree! Thou drawest me. 

Looking I see 

The Man of Sorrows die. 

Voice from the Judgment Hall, 

"No fault at all"; 

And yet came Calvary. 

O Life! facing sin's strife, 
Though hate be rife, 
And death draws surely near; 
For souls in sin fast bound 
Thou mad'st life's round, 
Unmoved by hate or fear. 

O Love! surpassing thought, 
That freedom brought 
For sinners such as I! 
Can aught that life can be 
Return to Thee 
More than a tear or sigh? 

O Cross! Let me count dross, 

Nor mourn the loss 

Of all that I hold gain, 

If by Thy blood I win 

Freedom from sin, 

And life washed from its stain. 



140 THE BROADER VISION 



ASPIRATION 

O Lord, to thee with humble heart 

I now draw near; 
Conscious of self, of what thou art, 

And filled with fear 
Lest I, unworthy as I be 
Even to bend a reverent knee, 
Should fail in this my prayer to thee: 

O Father, hear! 

O Lord, I long for power to bear 

With patient soul 
The bonds, the bands, the bends of care, 

In part, in whole; 
The fierce assaults temptations make, 
The passions that like tempests break, 
The lusts that life's foundations shake, 

Sin's waves that roll. 

O Lord, thou art my only hope; 

To thee I cry; 
Grace give to me, with sin to cope, 

Self to defy; 
To arm, to fight, to stand my ground, 
Heeding no whit what ills abound, 
Counting naught lost, but all things found, 

If thou art by. 



ASPIRATION 141 

So, Lord, though I am weak, not strong, 

The victory's mine. 
So, though the conflict may be long, 

I'll not decline 
Sin's fiercest battle. Sin I'll brave, 
And death defeat, and rob the grave 
Of every sting, since thou canst save, 

For thou art mine. 



142 THE BROADER VISION 



ENOCH 

"He walked with God." Where? How? Was it in ways, 
Think you, which lips can speak and eyes can trace? 

Was it as friend will walk with friend through days 
Storm-bound or glowing? Did he see the face 

Of Him who hideth from the eyes of men, 

Nor gives a faintest token to their ken? 

"He walked with God." Dim figure of the past, 
Far off upon the background of the world. 

Life was a shadow toward hope's future cast, 
And hope lay in the breaking dawn impearled; 

His deeds unsung in an unvocal age, 

Save one short record on a sacred page. 

"And he was not." That is the oft-told tale 
Of those whose lives pass as ships pass at night, 

Silent, but swift answering the wind-filled sail; 
They seek their distant port, then sink from sight. 

Did he pass thus into the great unknown, 

Leaving no record, even for his own? 

"And he was not." How sped the eager soul? 

Did around him, as around us now, 
Surge in, and o'er him wrecking waters roll? 



ENOCH 143 

Or stood he, pilot, at his own life's prow 
To mark the leeway and to keep the course, 
'Gainst whelming billows and fierce ocean's force? 

Not so. "God took him." Such the simple screed. 

He walked new paths with step strong, full, and free, 
Rich guerdon of untasted death his meed, 

And life that had been, lost in life to be. 
O'er ways unseen by mortal eyes he trod 
With step unfaltering, for "he walked with God.'* 



HOLIDAY AND ANNIVERSARY 
POEMS 



BIRD AND THEMORN 147 



THE BIRD AND THE MORN 

A fluttering bird beat at my window pane. 
Drear night; wild winds; cold, fiercely driving rain. 
The bird swept on, lost in the night again. 

One stood and knocked; knocked at my heart's closed 

door. 
Passion's rude blast beat fierce, as on the shore 
Wild breakers beat when the mad tempests roar. 

Spent was the storm, yet still that form was there; 
Not vanished like the bird that could not bear 
The swift, cold rushing of night's hostile air. 

Bright morning broke with clear auroral ray. 

Who art thou? Why thus at my heart's door stay? 

I am the Christ. This is the Easter Day. 



148 THE BROADER VISION 



ON EASTER MORNING 

The Christ who hung upon Calvary's cross 

Hung there for me. 
The Christ who suffered of all the loss, 

Suffered for me. 
But sorrow and death to him were naught; 
The loss and the cross salvation brought 
To the wandering sheep by the Shepherd sought 

That is to me. 

The form that rested in Joseph's tomb 

Lay there for me. 
The soul that tasted the awful doom 

Drank deep for me. 
But silence and sleep to him were naught; 
For the doom and the tomb salvation brought 
To the sin-slain soul that its Lover sought — 

That is to me. 

The King who bore the twin nights' delay 

Endured for me. 
The King who rose with the breaking day 

Arose for me. 
For the clutch of the grave to him was naught; 
The day and delay salvation brought 
To a hope-lorn sinner by Saviour sought — 

That is to me. 



AN EASTER HYMN 149 



AN EASTER HYMN 

O Thou enthroned beyond the radiant spheres, 
Strong Son of Man, victorious o'er the grave, 
Conqueror of death, and mighty thus to save, 
Ancient of Days, First of Eternal Years: 
To thee we raise 
Our hymn of praise, 
This Easter morn, this Easter morn. 

Delivered for our sins to Satan's power, 

Held close by death beneath the fast-sealed stone, 
Death linked to hell proclaimed thee as its own, 
And sung the victory in that awful hour. 
Sad hour of pain, 
When grief's refrain 
Sounded hope's knell, her long deathknell. 

But short the triumph; dawned the morn at last, 
Morn that should banish pain and grief and fear, 
Morn that should send to every coming year 
The note of joy for death's long power passed. 
Glad note of praise 
For hearts to raise 
That Easter morn, that Easter morn. 

"Not here, but risen!" was the angel's word. 
Go, tell the story, that the world may hear! 
Life conquers death, sorrow gives place to cheer, 



150 THE BROADER VISION 

And glad new hope in human hearts is stirred. 

Banished death's pain! 

That new refrain 
Is death's deathknell, death's long deathknell. 

O Thou enthroned beyond the radiant spheres, 
Our eyes, our hearts, our voices we would raise, 
Our souls outpour in one glad song of praise. 
Saviour from sin, Deliverer from our fears, 
To thee we raise 
Our hymn of praise 
This Easter morn, this Easter morn. 



ANOLDSTORY 151 



AN OLD STORY 
Which Cannot Be Told Too Often to a Doubting Age 

'Tis evening time. The shadows gather fast. 

From Calvary's cross to Joseph's tomb has passed 
A sorrowing group, bearing to final rest 
The broken form of One they had loved best. 

Grief, pain, dismay! Hope from each heart has fled; 

He whom they thought the Christ, the King, is dead, 

And Joseph's steps are slow, and bowed his head, 
Joseph of Arimathsea. 

Breaks the third morn, and ere the dawn of day, 
Out from the city and along the way 

Tombward, there goes in the gray morning's calm 
A sad-faced woman, bearing spice and balm 
For bis anointing. With heart sorely riven 
She weeps; within her, faith and doubt have striven, 
Ev'n though she knows her many sins forgiven, 
Mary, the Magdalene. 

Full day has dawned. Now at this Mary's call, 
Remembering not the night, the high priest's hall, 
The base denial, Simon Peter goes 
To seek the Lord, to rescue from its foes 
The stolen form. Moved only by the prayer, 



152 THE BROADER VISION 

"My Lord is gone, and oh, I know not where 
He lies!" hastes Simon, banishing despair, 
Simon the fisherman. 

But vain the search for him in rocky grave. 
What grip of death could hold him, strong to save? 
To death was left when broke the third day's dawn 
An empty tomb; the Lord of Life was gone. 
Yet sad in heart, though all the world lay fair, 
Stands Mary weeping, crying "Where, oh, where?" 
A voice! She looks. Lo, he is standing there, 
Jesus, her risen Lord. 

Oh, blessed moment! Night for her has flown; 
For her Light breaks, and not for her alone. 
Before his face, like her, we, too, may fall 
To hail him Master, hail him Lord of all. 
For still for us, as in the ages past, 
There dawns, when end the days of Lenten fast, 
An Easter morning, glorious, unsurpassed, 
Through Christ the Lord. 



HAIL, EASTER MORN! 153 



HAIL, EASTER MORN! 

Hail, Easter Morn! Sing every voice with joy! 

Christ rose triumphant, and we, too, shall rise* 
Great song of ages! never will it cloy; 

We send it echoing to the vaulted skies. 
"Praise be to God! burst is the rocky prison! 
Praise be to God! Jesus the Lord is risen." 

Hail, Easter Morn! Thine was a glorious dawn; 

Thy luster shone to gild all future years. 
Christ dead was sun of hope from men withdrawn; 

Christ risen was light reluming human fears. 
Hearts sad erstwhile took up the great refrain, 
He lives who once was dead! He lives again. 

Great day of promise, Easter of the soul! 

Faith raised her tear-dimmed eyes when Christ arose. 
Hope saw beyond that open tomb her goal: 

Love, comforted, forgot her day of woes. 
Grim shadows lifted from life's forward path, 
And glory was the soul's rich aftermath. 

Hail, Easter! Hail! No other day of time 

So great, save that on which the Christ was born. 

On this glad day, in every race and clime, 
Hearts full of love sing the incoming morn; 

Sing it, in ringing notes of glad accord; 

Sing it, in hallelujahs to the Lord. 



154 THE BROADER VISION 



WHITHER AWAY? 

Whither away in the early morn, 

Mary? 
Why sad of face and of heart forlorn, 

Mary? 
Why past the hill where three crosses stand, 
With balm and spicery in thy hand, 

Mary? 

"To the garden where I saw them lay 

In the gloom my Lord. 
But who will roll me the stone away 

From the tomb of my Lord?" 

Already is lifting the long night's gloom, 

Mary. 
See, through the shadows an open tomb, 

Mary. 
For the heavy stone is rolled away; 
Here breaks the dawn of the world's new day, 

Mary! 

A cry of grief rends the morning air: 

"Borne away, my Lord! 
And I know not, oh, I know not where 

They will lay my Lord." 



WHITHER AWAY? 155 

On the garden path why weepest thou, 

Woman? 
At the open tomb whom seekest thou, 

Woman? 
See, by the flooding light of dawn, 
The tomb is empty, the watch is gone, 

Woman. 

From a broken heart her sad reply: 

"Sir, where is my Lord?" 
"Mary!" She lifts her wondering eye — 

"Rabboni! My Lord!" 



156 THE BROADER VISION 



DECORATION DAY 

To our comrades of the sixties in the blue! 
To our foes below the rivers in the gray! 
You who heard the wild drum's rattle, 
The shrill bugle's call to battle, 
And to drum-call and to bugle-call were true. 
On the lowlands some are sleeping far away, 
Sleeping silent in the lowlands far away. 

Oh, 'twas come, come, come, the call we heard I 
And the drum, drum, drum our pulses stirred : 

And the martial heart was strong; 

Though the battle front was long, 
From the shock of war no comrade was deterred. 

Those were days when the breath of death was strong; 

When it kissed men on their foreheads, and they fell: 

When the pale horse and his rider 

Were for shot and shell the guider, 

As he rode down the battle line so long. 

And we knew the call to charge was the knell, 

For the blue and the gray, the sure deathknell. 

Oh, the flag! how we followed where it led! 
How we strove to save it in the battle hour! 
Stained and faded, torn and tattered, 
Though the battle front was shattered, 



DECORATION DAY 157 

And our comrades lay in heaps around it, dead. 
Not a soldier's heart that saw the flag would cower; 
'Neath Old Glory, red and gory, could not cower. 

Dear old comrades of the sixties, here's to you! 

Dear old foemen of the Southland, here's a hand! 

Reverently we strew our flowers 

On your soldiers' graves and ours, 

On the graves of all who wore or gray or blue. 

Gray and blue, heart to heart we'll ever stand; 

Blue and gray, living, loving, ever stand. 

Oh, 'twas come, come, come, the call we heard I 
And the drum, drum, drum our pulses stirred : 

Every martial heart was strong, 

And though battle front was long, 
From the shock of war no soldier was deterred. 



158 THE BROADER VISION 



THE SONG OF LIBERTY 

" In their ragged regimentals 
Stood the Old Continentals." 

Toward Concord through the midnight hours 
The rider spurred his sinewy roan. 

"Up! forth! To arms! the battle lowers !" 
So went the cry, by night wind blown. 

Toward Concord marched at break of day 
The serried line from foreign shore. 

At night, beneath the stars men lay, 

Fast gripped by death, to march no more. 

The shot was fired; the die was cast; 

Louder than sound of minute-gun, 
Or roll of drum, or bugle blast, 

Called freedom's voice from Lexington. 

The die was cast. Through all the land 
The beacons burned, the couriers sped; 

Eye flashed to eye, hand clasped with hand 
For Concord bridge and patriot dead. 

From glen, from farm, from mountain, men 
Sunburned, alert, and strong of will, 

Marched at the call of country, when 
The war-storm swept o'er Bunker Hill. 



THE SONG OF LIBERTY 159 

They heard the cracking rifle's call; 

They heard the cry when Warren fell; 
Took down the musket from the wall, 

And said, "To die like him is well." 

Ticonderoga felt their tread 

And Bennington their valor knew; 
By Schuylkill's stream they laid their dead 

O'ershaded by the spreading yew. 

The winter night, the icy stream, 

The barges filled with patriot souls, 
The still, stern march at morning's gleam, 

Then victory's wave through Trenton rolls. 

Oh, Valley Forge! thy freezing breath 
Blew fierce and chill beneath thy trees, 

Where ragged soldiers, stalked by death, 
In reverence prayed on bended knees. 

How fair Wyoming lay at night; 

O'er her green glade the war-whoop broke; 
Charred embers at the morning light 

Told where had fallen the fearful stroke. 

The slow years dragged their length away. 

Men faltered not, though thousands died. 
Men faltered not, but toward the day 

Pressed, flinching not, with God as guide. 



160 THE BROADER VISION 

Day dawned at last by Yorktown's shore. 

Great freedom's sun resplendent rose. 
Its light on earth to pale no more, 

Till life and time alike shall close. 

Great men, with greater purpose filled! 

They fought for freedom, and they won. 
The years were slow, but God had willed 

The issue, and His will was done. 

These were our sires. Their sons are we. 

We tread with reverence where they trod. 
Their motto, "God hath made men free"; 

Their guerdon, Country, Home, and God. 



OLD-TIME MEMORIES 161 



OLD-TIME MEMORIES 

The harvests are gathered, the fields are bare, 
The chill of the autumn is on the air. 

The brook in the meadow, still fringed with sedge, 
Feels the touch of the ice-king at its edge. 

Beyond the river the mountains rise; 
Snow-silvered, they shine as the daylight dies. 

The northwind sweeps where the reapers sang, 
And the earth is hard where the fresh grain sprang. 

The toilers are gone with their laugh and jest; 
The greensward sleeps, and the forests rest. 

One robin sings late on the leaf -bare bough, 
The last of his kind; 'twill be winter now. 

Cold, dreary and dark is the world to-night, 
But the home within is aglow with light. 

The table is loaded with homely cheer, 

The fruit of the goodness that crowns the year. 



162 THE BROADER VISION 

Praise God, 'tis from him that all blessings flow! 
Give thanks, all his creatures in earth below. 

Where the fire leaps high, by the hearth they kneel, 
To voice the thanksgiving glad hearts should feel. 



THANKSGIVING HYMN 163 



A THANKSGIVING HYMN 

God of our fathers, who didst lead 
By ways unknown, o'er trackless sea, 

Those souls of faith and strenuous deed, 
With grateful hearts we turn to thee. 

On rocky shore, 'neath wintry sky, 

Where mantling snow the earth o'erlaid, 

And ocean tossed fierce breakers high, 

They reverent knelt, they grateful prayed. 

They thanked thee for the guiding grace 
That gave New England for the Old; 

Then turned to front with dauntless face 
What terrors life or death might hold. 

They recked not sound of surging seas, 
Nor feared the wind-swept forest's roar; 

High o'er the voice of howling breeze 

Their steadfast hearts thanksgivings pour. 

And we, their children, sing to-day 

The strong "Te Deum" which they sang; 

With single heart the prayer we pray 
Which through their forest vistas rang. 



164 THE BROADER VISION 

We praise thee for the rounded year, 
For home, for joy, for rest, for peace, 

For bursting barns, for banished fear, 
And love that lasts without surcease. 

So thanking thee, great God of grace, 
We raise our prayer, our praise we sing; 

Our sires in thee found dwellingplace; 
Let us find rest beneath thy wing. 



CHRISTMAS MORN 165 



CHRISTMAS MORN 

Sweetly sang the choirs of angels 

When our Christ was born: 
Holy anthems, glad evangels, 

Ushered in the morn. 
Through the wintry night air pealing, 
Swelled the song God's love revealing — 
"Peace on earth, good will to men." 

Down the intervening ages 

Rings the holy word; 
Infant lips and lips of sages 

Join to praise the Lord. 
And, while Christmas bells are ringing, 
Thousand hearts their joys are singing, 
"Peace on earth, good will to men." 

Hear, O heart, the simple story; 

On this Christmas morn, 
Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory, 

Unto you is born. 
And, while earth and heaven rejoices, 
Join, O heart, those happy voices, 
"Peace on earth, good will to men." 



166 THE BROADER VISION 



CHRISTMAS EVE 

The star in the East is bright to-night, 

As in ages long ago, 
When out on the hills came radiant light, 
And the glory song swept down the night, 

To the watching hearts below, 
That under the stars lone vigil kept, 
While the distant town in quiet slept. 

The peace on the earth is great to-night, 

For the Child of the star is king, 
And the hope of the world is rising bright 
That the end of struggle and long fierce fight 

The new day's dawn will bring, 
When all hearts shall rest in the dream of peace, 
And sorrow and pain and tears shall cease. 



FOR CHRISTMAS 167 



FOR CHRISTMAS 

I went to the forest, and asked of the trees, 
As bowing and swaying they bent to the breeze, 
"Now tell me, my brothers, pray tell, if you please, 

Just what can you do for Christmas?" 
And straightway they answered, the dark, lofty trees, 
As spicy and fragrant they waved in the breeze, 
"We're trying our best to grow tall, if you please; 

We're trying to grow for Christmas." 

I passed by the draper's, and saw in a box 

Great masses of stockings, both plain and with clocks, 

And eager I asked them, "You neat little socks, 

Just what will you do for Christmas?" 
And straightway they answered from out of their box, 
Those stout-footed stockings, both plain and with clocks, 
"We'll try to fulfill the first duty of socks, 

We'll try to keep whole for Christmas." 

I entered the toy-shop, and said to the toys, 
Such wonderful treasures for girls and for boys, 
"You dear, pretty playthings, you holiday joys, 

Pray what will you do for Christmas?" 
And straightway they answered, those shining new toys, 
Those marvelous presents for girls and for boys, 
"To play with a child is the chief of our joys; 

We'll play with them all on Christmas." 



168 THE BROADER VISION 

I climbed to the belfry, and questioned the bell, 
All murmuring with sound like the heart of a shell, 
"Now tell me, my silver tongue, truthfully tell, 

What song you'll ring out on Christmas?" 
And straightway the resonant voice of the bell, 
All vibrant with sound like a tropical shell, 
Replied, "The glad message I'll joyfully tell, 

'Good Tidings' I'll ring on Christmas." 

I wandered to cloudland, and asked of the snow, 
As dancing and whirling it sped to and fro, 
"Now tell me, fair snowflakes, I long so to know, 

Just what are your plans for Christmas?" 
And straightway they answered, the soft flakes of snow, 
As circling and floating they whirled to and fro, 
"We think we should do the best thing, do you know, 

If we fell thick and white for Christmas." 

I asked of the tapers, the stars, and each light 
That blooms in the heavenly garden of night, 
"Now tell me, ye shining ones, lovely and bright, 

What best can you do for Christmas?" 
And straightway they answered, star, taper and light, 
All blooming and fair in the garden of night, 
" O'er land and o'er ocean we'll beam clear and bright, 

We'll shine out our best for Christmas." 

So I found that all things in the sky and the earth, 
Trees, stockings and toys, with full sense of their worth, 
Stars, bells and the snow, for the sweet Christ-child's birth, 
Would each do their best for Christmas. 



FOR CHRISTMAS 169 

For snow, stars and bells, with all things on the earth, 
Know well that the measure of what they are worth, 
When comes the glad hour of the dear Christ-child's birth, 
Is the good things they do on Christmas. 

So I come to this band of glad boys and sweet girls, 
With cheeks red as roses, and teeth white as pearls, 
And ask you, bright eyes, and you, soft tossing curls, 

"Just what will you do for Christmas?" 
Let this be your answer, brave boys and fair girls, 
While the roses grow redder, and whiter the pearls, 
"By our sparkling bright eyes, by our soft tossing curls, 

We'll make some hearts glad on Christmas." 



170 THE BROADER VISION 



NIGHT: STAR: CHILD 

An angel flying in the wintry night: 
A burst of song follows a burst of light. 

Wise eastern men watch eastern skies afar, 
Where gleams in radiant light a kingly star. 

A manger; cattle stalled; a mother mild: 
Adoring magi hail as king the Child. 



A CHRISTMAS SONG 171 



A CHRISTMAS SONG 

"Born this day" was the midnight song, 

That fell on the shepherds' ears: 

"Born this day" in yon silent town 

On which the clear-eyed stars looked down : 

And the deathless carol of endless years 

Floats on the wintry air along, 

As it bursts from the lips of the angel throng 

A calm to their needless fears. 

"Born this day" - — oh, the wondrous word! 

"Born this day" — Jesus Christ, the Lord! 

"Born a King" — such the wise men's word 

That fell on the ear of power. 

"Born a King" — and we follow the star 

That gleamed for us in the Orient far 

And hath led us to this good hour. 

We seek him with longing that will not cease 

Till we find him, and hail him Prince of Peace; 

Hail him Wonderful, Counselor. 

"Born a King" — oh, the wondrous word! 

"Born a King" — Jesus Christ, the Lord! 

"Born this day" — let us swell the strain 
Which came on the midnight clear. 
"Born a King" — let us own the sign, — 
The gleaming star of the Child divine, 



172 THE BROADER VISION 

Our Redeemer from sin and fear. 

Let us hail him Saviour, in glad refrain, 

Let us hail him born as our King to reign 

And worship with heart sincere. 

"Born this day" — oh, the wondrous word! 

"Born a King" — Jesus Christ, the Lord. 



BELLS IN THE NIGHT 173 



BELLS IN THE NIGHT 

I heard the sound of bells at midnight hour, 
The hour that follows after Christmas Eve. 

They broke my slumber, as from distant tower 
They seemed to say the things our souls believe. 

One deep-toned bell I heard, faroff, unseen, 

Ask, "Son of man, what does the Christmas mean? 

But ere my soul could frame a fit reply, 
There floated to me through the midnight sky 
From the far belfry tower the ringing chime 
That told the story of the Christmas time. 

What does the Christmas mean? 
Oh, this! The heart of God, love-filled, 
Yearning o'er heart of man, self-willed: 
Wonder! the blood of Christ's heart, spilled 

To make our poor hearts clean. 

What should the Christmas pray? 
Pray this: O Lord of love and grace, 
Save us, a sinful, self-willed race, 
And with the Christ to us give place 

In heaven's eternal day. 

What should the Christmas speak? 
Let love's sweet message be the word, 



174 THE BROADER VISION 

By power of love let thought be stirred; 
Then strength divine shall undergird 
The souls that Jesus seek. 

What shall the Christmas sing? 
This song: Redeeming love shall win 
Man's ransomed heart from self and sin, 
And Christ, supreme, shall reign within, 

Of human hearts the King. 

So sang the bells unto the midnight air. 

Their cadence died. I gave my heart to prayer. 



LIGHT THATSHALL BE 175 



LIGHT THAT SHALL BE 

" Peace beginning to be, 
Deep as the sleep of the sea." 

— Sir Edwin Arnold 

Unfurling ages: 

Prophets, priests and sages 
Foretell the coming of effulgent light. 

On history's pages 

War's wild tumult rages, 
Nor ends in dawning, misery's murky night. 
Will ever come the break of brighter day? 
Will ever night and storm and rack give way? 

Fresh watch-fires burning: 

At close of day returning, 
Judsean shepherds fold their weary flocks. 

Vigil eyes keeping 

Watch, while others, sleeping, 
Forget alarms and gray Time's rudest shocks. 
Suddenly, like the trumpet's far fanfare, 
An angel voice rings on the midnight air. 

Great joy, the tidings! 

From celestial hidings 
For all mankind fares forth the waited hour. 

Uplifted portals, 

Joy for sin-slaved mortals; 
Behold the Prince of Peace in kingly power! 
Light of the Golden Age dawns clear at last; 
Comes on the hour when sin and hate are past. 



176 THE BROADER VISION 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS 

Written for the One Hundredth Anniversary of the 
Founding of Middlebury College 



One Hundred Years : One Hundred Years : What are One 

Hundred Years? 
A ten-arched span of decades, bridging the hopes and fears 
Of the slow stream of life, like dungeon darkness slow, 
And yet that speeds as meteors speed, in its ever onward 

flow. 

One Hundred Years: One Hundred Years : What are One 

Hundred Years? 
A hundred flowering springtimes, now laughing, now in 

tears: 
A hundred stalwart summers, wresting by daily toil 
And sweat of brow their daily bread, from oft unwilling 

soil; 
A hundred restful autumns, rich in their golden store; 
A hundred silver winters, whitening the stained world o'er. 

One Hundred Years: One Hundred Years : What are One 

Hundred Years? 
In Clio's hand on Helicon one more closed scroll appears : 
The records of the hoary past, the sayings of the wise, 
Are swelled by page on page that tell how nations fall 

and rise: 
And how upon these western shores, 'neath freedom's flag 

unfurled, 
The hero-child of liberty stands champion of the world. 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS 177 

One Hundred Years: One Hundred Years : What are One 

Hundred Years? 
A time whose vast achievements pass all visions of all 

seers; 
Whose hands have weighed the planets, and writ crea- 
tion's story; 
Whose feet have left mid arctic snows the imprint of their 

glory; 
Whose ears have heard the voices of all lands beyond all 

seas; 
Whose eyes have seen God's mighty hand lay bare his 

mysteries; 
Whose lips have spoken words whose weight breaks 

shackles and makes free, 
And still shall break till time shall bring to all men liberty. 

One Hundred Years : One Hundred Years : What are One 
Hundred Years? 

Our Alma Mater's lifetime, and they wake our hearts to 
cheers : 

What though her numbers are but few, she's in achieve- 
ment great: 

Great in her patience, in her faith, and in her power to 
wait 

While centuries come and centuries go, if such the call 
shall be, 

Till patience, faith and power joined shall crown her 
destiny. 



A GROUP OF SONNETS 



SPRING 181 



SPRING 

Long prisoned by the frost-king's icy hand, 

River and lake burst from his freezing thrall. 

The bell-mouthed crocus lifts the rigid pall 
To tint with brilliance the awakening land; 
On the greensward, blues, whites and yellows stand, 

With beauty answering waking Nature's call. 

Far in the glen, where deep woods' shadows fall, 
The petals of anemones expand. 

An unseen host moves over flood and field, 

The streams find freedom from the bonding chill. 
On lawn and lea, on vale and crested hill, 

The dead, the sere to life's strong pulses yield, 
And Nature answers with her gladsome song 
To Spring, her lover who has wooed her long. 



182 THE BROADER VISION 



SUMMER 

The earth, long slumbering in the icy hall 

Where snow-robed Winter held relentless sway, 
Waked by the shining of the gladsome day 

When Summer's herald, Spring, with rapturous call 

Proclaims the breaking of the frost-king's thrall, 
Unlocks the streams; while flowers in bright array, 
A tinted army, fragrant homage pay 

As on the sward the colored petals fall. 

Now shadows of the cloud sweep o'er the grain, 
And tasseled corn joys in the glowing sun. 

The pastures drink the gently falling rain; 

Homeward the cattle wend when day is done. 

Out on the lake the windless sail is furled, 

While night-bird's note sings vesper for the world. 



AUTUMN 183 



AUTUMN 

The flaming torches of the autumn days 
Wave in the breezes of the dying year. 
Like clouds past sunset, when the night is near, 

The forests glow illumed with richest rays 

On mount, by stream, or where in lonely ways 
The swaying maples, and the oaks austere, 
In somber brown, in crimsons shining clear, 

Stand glory-clothed before our raptured gaze. 

The river winds its way past barring hills, 
Now swift, now still in broad expanse it lies 
And mirrors back the tints of woods and skies. 

Far overhead the lingering song-bird trills, 

Then seeks his rest where dark pines stand serene 
Or flittering birches flaunt their silvery sheen. 



184 THE BROADER VISION 



WINTER 

Bleak, bare, and bending to the boisterous breeze 
Like things bereft of hope, and still pursued 
By hostile fate in stern, persistent mood, 

Stand lone or forest-grouped the shivering trees, 

While somber cadences to minor keys 

Sweep through their branches, and the Winter rude 
Laughs to behold them gaunt, and sere, and nude; 

Then requiem sings in chilling melodies. 

The darkening water of the river tells 

Of icy darts that pierce the flowing stream, 
In every drop to rob it of its gleam; 

While from the mountain crests roll down great swells 
Of soughing sounds that seem like heaven's sighs 
Breathed o'er the dying year from arching skies. 



THE WINTER TREES 185 



THE WINTER TREES 

The bough is bare. A single leaf hangs sere, 

Last token of the full tide of the year. 

The trees stand shivering, stripped and dead, as though 

The glory of the summer had not been, 

And through their naked tops the sky is seen, 

While, from far background of hills clothed with snow, 
Comes light that makes the somber picture glow 

And westering sun tints browns with silvery sheen. 

So, when our life seems like the tree top bare, 
All its green joy only a summer flare, 

The faith-filled eye can see the hidden blue, 
And the full glory of immortal hope, 
While unillumined souls in darkness grope, 

And see of life naught but the somber hue. 



186 THE BROADER VISION 



ANEMONE 

A pearly-petaled flower in forest glade, — 

Where mosses cluster and where brown leaves lie, 
Where overhead the dark pines sway and sigh 

To the soft breeze; where, at the evening's shade, 

The timid fawn, of earth's wild sounds afraid, 
Steals cautious forth, alert, with wary eye, 
Ready at danger's sight or sound to fly, — 

I found, as up the quiet glen I strayed. 

It was a spring anemone. It told 

Of summer days, of autumn harvests due; 

Of fields embrightened by the rod of gold 
Which Nature waves as scepter for the due 

Which toil must pay, as tribute for the store 

She waits with lavish hand again to pour. 



NIGHTFALL 187 



NIGHTFALL 

I heard at eve the pealing of a bell 

Swept by the breeze across the darkening plain. 

A single note, it sank; then clear again 
Upon my ear its cadence rose and fell 
Like waves of ocean, when they sink and swell 

Beneath the power that rocks the rolling main; 

Or like the music of an old refrain, 
Now high, now low, heart-holding by its spell. 

Then, far above, on branch of towering pine, 

High, sweet, and vibrant thrilled the night-bird's song, 

The vesper note that marks the day's decline. 
So bird and bell, near and afar, prolong 

In tones harmonic evening's lullaby, 

Till glittering stars gleam in the azure sky. 



188 THE BROADER VISION 



A SUMMER NIGHT 

Now slowly evening draws her curtaining veil. 
Dark, silhouetted 'gainst the leadening skies 
Stand fringing forests. Silent, silvery, lies 

The unrippled lake. Yonder a windless sail 

Marks where a boat awaits some favoring gale. 
See now the afterglow in glory rise, 
Heaven's wordless tribute to the day that dies; 

Voiceless falls night, grim in her sable mail. 

How high the stars ! Far on the azure dome 
They take their place, respondent to the call 

Of Him who in his unseen heavenly home 
Nor sleeps nor slumbers, watching over all. 

Earth rests. The night wind gently stirs the trees. 

The note of hermit thrush comes down the breeze. 



EVENTIDE 189 



EVENTIDE 

Dark, leaden clouds, as hours of daylight die, 
Lie somber drift-heaps, banked against the blue. 
Below them sinks the sun, nor struggles through 

One brightening ray to cheer the watcher's eye, 

Or paint the wings of ships that sail the sky. 
Gone is day's glory; comes the darkening hue 
That shuts the gate of vision to the view, 

And opes the door forth which night's dangers fly. 

But look! A cloud-rift, and a radiant light 
Silvering the edge, which swiftly turns to gold, 

While crimson glory tints the wave of night, 
From nether ocean of the sky inrolled. 

Up past mid-arch of heaven the glory flies, 

To kiss day's portal ere the day beam dies. 



190 THE BROADER VISION 



MORS — LUX 

Marsh grass, all verdure gone, stalks sere and brown, 
Dead emblems of a life no more to be, 
Stretching across the lowlands to the sea; 

Dull clouds o'erhead, the old year's dying frown 

Upon the ruin of her summer's crown; 

A few leaves rustling in a half wrecked tree, 
And cold, pale rays that steal across the lea 

From the low sun, fast hastening to its down. 

But list! Above the ruin spreading far, 

Nature will throw her spotless robe of white, 

And distant spheres, each gleaming, glowing star 
Will o'er it pour their radiant flood of light, 

While hands divine weave 'neath the dead world's bier 

A wondrous garment for the coming year. 



THE GUEST ROOM 191 



THE GUEST ROOM 

The prophet's chamber with its open door 
Survives the shock of ages, and can still 
With peace and calm and wordless comfort fill 

The heart that finds it as in days of yore. 

Life's tides may still through deep-worn channels pour, 
But thither bring no freight of carking ill. 
In that blest spot no wintry storm can chill. 

Faith, hope, and love abide; life wants no more. 

Refreshed and strengthened greet the coming day. 

Take up the burden, for a night laid down, 
Ready for aught; add labor what it may, 

Take it with joy, and never thought of frown. 
The prophet's chamber is toil's anteroom; 
Gird there for duty; then God's task resume. 



192 THE BROADER VISION 



THE WATCHER 

High on the cliffs above the rolling sea, 
The watcher scanned the far horizon line, 
Heedless alike of wind and cloud. "Not mine 

To care how long or wild the tempest be, 

If but one bark comes sailing back to me." 
Slowly the sun moved down the long incline 
To the far portal where its light benign 

Fades, as day closes and night turns the key. 

High up the cliff howled the storm's raucous roar: 
In from the west the fisher barks were driven. 

The morning broke. The watcher's eye no more 
Swept the wild sea. Blinded by tears, and riven 

Of love and joy, she groped her lonely way 

Back from the night, into the hopeless day. 



THE GLEN AND SHADOW 193 



THE GLEN AND THE SHADOW 

The glen o'er which the forests grimly close 

Receives the sunbeam as a welcome friend. 
Shimmering o'er leaf and rill and calm repose 

Of granite cliffs, silent to earth it goes. 
Touched by its gleam, poplars and birches bend 

As sun-kissed breezes 'mid their slim stems float. 
The sun sets; shadow darkens into night, 

Cold, somber, cheerless; and the night-bird's note 
Pours wailing from his tiny feathered throat, 

Sounding no prophecy of future light, 
Nor hint that morn shall break with radiance bright, 

And sunbeam soft again with shadow blend. 

Yet murmurs not the glen, though past its day, 
Nor moans the loss of friendly, shimmering ray. 



194 THE BROADER VISION 



THE ANGELUS 

The vibrant tone of the deep-throated bell 

Sounds clear, strong, sweet from the old minster tower 
Across the moorland, as the evening hour 

Draws down. On heart of patient toil a spell 

Is cast by cadences that sink and swell 

As waves, land-driven by the gentle power 

Of coursing winds, whiles yet no storm-clouds lower, 

And on the deep the night-watch calls, "All's well!" 

Far out beyond the turmoil of the town, 

Where the long sand-line marks the ocean's sweep, 
And lazy waves up the long sand-slope creep 

To kiss the feet of sedge grass sere and brown, 
Rolls on the music of the call to prayer, 
And faith makes answer, and forgets her care. 



SELF-COMPREHENSION 195 



SELF-COMPREHENSION 

"The laborer is worthy of his hire." 
No matter where the fields his labor tills, 
If 'twixt the dawn and dusk his purpose fills 

The grand ambition to rise ever higher; 

If through his veins his pulses send desire 
To reach fife's goal; if in his soul he wills 
To win his fight 'gainst all opposing ills, 

Kindling each day afresh the noble fire. 

So toiling, he shall come at last to know 
The power that lies in earnest effort made; 

So toiling, he shall find e'en here below 
The sweetest guerdon e'er to labor paid: 

The tribute paid by self to service done, 

The soul's rejoicing over victory won. 



196 THE BROADER VISION 



LIBERTY 

The power to choose one's way restrained by none 

Save Him who gave the soul its power to choose; 

The power to grasp and hold, or to refuse 
What life shall proffer as its course is run; 
The power to finish or to leave undone, 

Reckless of ends, whether one gain or lose; 

Men call this liberty, and oft abuse 
God's gift, that can but be by service won. 

For liberty is guerdon for that soul 

That, serving, finds itself most truly free; 

That, yielding, for the good of life's great whole, 
Part of its right, gains yet the victory. 

For they are freest who to others give 

The right that self demands, the right to live. 



LOVE 197 



LOVE 

That love should be akin to human pain 

Seems passing strange; but yet life blends them so, 
That which is pain, which love, one scarce may know, 

When from the heartstrings sounds the mingled strain, 

Until one asks to hear it o'er again. 

And then, too oft, repeating brings but woe 
That wrings the soul and makes the tears o'erflow, 

Since love is lost in the retoned refrain. 

And yet with joy I even such price would pay 
If I could know that love at last would be 
The overtone of the whole harmony. 

If I could know the pain would pass away, 
Then could I bless the hand that from above 
Struck first the note of pain, then that of love. 



198 THE BROADER VISION 



THE MASTER PASSION 

Into the toil, unto the daily task 

Faith moves once more; her heart has purpose strong, 
Be the day's burden great or pathway long, 

To tread the path, and for the burden ask 

The strength to bear; nor thinks to idly bask 
In the world's brilliance, nor to hear the song 
Which pleasure sings to lure the passing throng 

To scenes where rule the revel and the mask. 

For faith, earth's sirens have no swerving call; 

Her course lies straight, be it through night or day. 
For faith, earth's burdens, be they great or small, 

Are light, since Christ is life and truth and way. 
Faith's master passion, brings life good or ill, 
Is sweet submission to her Master's will. 



THEGHURGH 199 



THE CHURCH 

Four-square to all the winds that fiercely blow, 
Her turrets rising from her bastioned walls, 
A peaceful fortress; echoing through her halls 

No tread of men armed 'gainst an earthly foe, 

But the soft tread of passing to and fro 
Of those whose voices join in gentle calls, 
As one by one each at the altar falls, 

Of Him from whom all earthly blessings flow. 

A peaceful fortress to cathedral turned; 

Her casemates, cloisters, and her barracks, homes; 
Her sentries, preachers; and, where watch-fires burned, 

Rise countless shrines, with spires or rounded domes, 
That tell the world that gruesome war must cease, 
And Christ, triumphant, reign as Prince of Peace. 



200 THE BROADER VISION 



GRACE 

Grace free as freedom, but no spoil of war; 
Grace pouring in as pours the ocean tide, 
When on its swelling crests, outspreading wide, 

Wave after wave, white-capped, sent in from far, 

Like ocean's coursers with triumphal car, 
Surging, rejoicing, flashing, sunbeams ride 
To kiss the waiting sands, as if their bride, 

Ceaseless, from dawn till shines the evening star. 

So grace, deep as that ever rolling sea, 

Gift of a love that knows nor rest nor pause, 
While God is God, and love obeys his laws, 

Flows for our souls from cross-crowned Calvary; 
And on its waves that lave our life the while 
Hides the sweet sunshine of his grace-lit smile. 



THE REFUGE 



201 



THE REFUGE 

Love binding with a bond more strong than fate, 
And recking not the fiercest blasts that blow, 
By passion loosed, nor fearing waves that strow 

Along life's shores wrecks made by sin and hate, 

Holds human souls impelled by purpose great, 
Though long the way and the on-going slow, 
Though sharp the assault of ever watchful foe, 

To walk the narrow way to glory's gate. 

For God is love, and strength is in his arm, 

And no opposer can his will defeat. 
And love is peace, that smiles at rude alarm, 

And peace means rest, when love and life shall meet. 
Yea, God is love, the unbroken bond that holds 
The' storm-tossed soul, and to himself enfolds. 



202 THE BROADER VISION 



POWER AND LOVE 

With head uplifted while his keen eye flashed 
Conscious that life his great behest must heed, 
Thinking of triumph on the martial field 
Where hosts to stronger hosts opposing yield, 
Power cried, "Crown me Glory," nor abashed 
Thought that the prayer meant life's ambitions dashed 
For other men. "Straight shall my purpose speed 
On to its goal, though many hearts may bleed." 

Then whispered Love with gentle voice and low: 
"Since hearts must bleed if this thy purpose be, 
With thee, companion, handmaid, let me go, 
With heart to pity, and with eyes to see 
And hand to heal the aching, breaking heart." 
But Power replied, "No: let us never start." 



SAMUEL H. HADLEY 203 



SAMUEL H. HADLEY 

A broken reed on which no life could lean : 

A bit of flotsam tossed on hostile shore: 

A human wreck was he, and nothing more. 
Sometimes the thought of what he might have been 
Fell on his soul. As snowflakes on the green 

In late spring days when winter's rule is o'er 

Whiten a moment, then pass open door 
Of waking earth into the vast unseen; 

So thoughts at random fell on this poor soul, 

But left no impress for a future good. 
And then the change. "Christ Jesus makes thee whole." 

Grew straight the broken reed; the wave-tossed wood 
Became a way-mark; and the wreck a guide 
To souls adrift out on Sin's whelming tide. 



204 THE BROADER VISION 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

In days when clouds hung dark, when fierce winds blew, 
When hope in patriot breasts was pulsing slow, 
When civil strife was touching life with woe, 

When, like ill-omened bird, dire anguish drew 

The cry, "O Lord, how long?" then vision new 
Came to one waiting soul, inspired to know 
How work together, even here below, 

All things for good to them whose hearts are true. 

She touched her harp; she sang her glory strain, 
"Mine eyes have seen the coming of the Lord.'* 

High hope beat fast, and life forgot its pain, 
Clear voices answered to the vibrant chord. 

"His vintage he is trampling," thus she sang, 

And through the land one mighty echo rang. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 205 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Like rugged stone cut from its mountain bed 

And wrought by hands divine with matchless power 
For Freedom's temple in Time's crucial hour, 

He stood, strong soul, by noble purpose led 

To save the Union by fierce foes bestead. 

Great heart, unheeding threatening clouds that lower, 
And sweeping storms that make the craven cower, 

He forward moved with strong, unfaltering tread. 

The nation, saved, wreathes with its immortelles 
The rugged column that repelled the stroke 

That threatened death; and its loud anthem swells 
In ringing notes to him whose daring broke 

The slave's hard chain, and gave him right to be 

On Freedom's soil the child of Liberty. 



206 THE BROADER VISION 



WILLIAM C. GRAY 

A sturdy spirit cradled in the storm 

When life was young, when fears brought no alarms 
That in young manhood's hour felt all the charms 

That strength incarnate lends to mortal form; 

For whom stern truth was standard, guide, and norm; 
Erect, alert, self-poised with folded arms 
In manhood's prime, sin neither daunts nor harms 

As with brave tongue he speaks for life's reform. 

Yet graced with smile that wins sweet childhood's heart, 
With laugh as music-full as wild thrush-song, 

With jest all guileless, but of wondrous art, 
With humor subtle, gentle, fresh and strong — 

Titan in this our untitanic day, 

Master of arts — the genial, grave and gay. 



TO-DAY'S BETHLEHEM 207 



TO-DAY'S BETHLEHEM 

Once Bethlehem's shepherds 'neath night's sable wing 
Heard at the midnight hour the angel call, 
"Good tidings of great joy to you, to all 

Who to the promise of the prophets cling; 

For unto you this day is born a King. 
Go where he lies cradled in manger stall, 
And at his feet reverent, obeisant fall, 

And all your hearts in worship thither bring." 

And still the shepherds watch as long ago, 
And still the seraph choir sings in the night, 

And still the strains of heavenly music flow; 
If still, like them of old on upland height, 

Our ears are open to hear seraphs sing, 

And eyes are watching for the coming King. 



208 THE BROADER VISION 



NIGHTFALL 

The last poem written by Richard Sill Holmes. 

Soft lies the long, low cloud upon the sky, 
One edge gold-broidered by the needling light, 
One silvered. 'Tis the setting sun's Good Night 

To toiling millions as the day hours die. 

Earth's restless hum is hushed. The night-bird's cry 
Alone is heard, weird, falling from the height 
Of the lone pine; a trill that marks the flight 

Of day; yet still a song and not a sigh. 

So be our lives; their cloud lines glorified, 

Their evening tints more wondrous than their day; 

Their somber shadows richened, beautified, 

Though pauseless still we tread the westward way; 

Hope, like the night-bird, sounding clear above 

One note that ne'er shall die, Eternal Love. 



SPARKS FROM THE THOUGHT 
ANVIL 



ANTITHESES AND ANALOGIES 211 



ANTITHESES AND ANALOGIES 

A flash light reveals the fact of darkness with em- 
phasis. A searchlight reveals the contents of darkness. 
Conscience is often both. 

Independence is good for a man as long as he is by him- 
self. After association with others begins, interdepend- 
ence is better. 

To be near the truth and pass it by without knowing 
is worse than to be far from it but steadily though slowly 
toiling toward it. 

To have nothing in character or conduct to defend is 
better than the best defense ever made. 

The world owes no man a living, but every man owes 
the world an honest effort to get one. 

To see truth as it is, though distasteful, is better than 
to see it as it is not, though delectable. 

Trouble, in its growth and seed-sowing, is often like a 
dandelion. Its root is single; its seeds fly to the ends of 
the earth. 

The waves are not the ocean, but only results of the 
storms that sweep its surface. So, emotions are not life. 



212 THE BROADER VISION 

To believe nothing with all one's might is better than 
to half-believe something and continually apologize for 
the half -belief . 

Poetry is language dancing to the music of the imagina- 
tion. Its rhymes are only the pause points of its feet. 

Sunshine never asks: "On what shall I shine?" It 
just shines. We suspect that is the way God loves. 

To be useful one need not blow a trumpet nor beat a 
drum. A cambric needle makes no noise; neither does a 
pen that writes a letter to a sorrowing soul. 

Self-moderation in one's own speech is better than 
another's toleration for that speech. 

The creators like Homer, Plato, Moses and Paul have 
been few. The imitators are a vast army whose work has 
beautified the world. 

If broken promises make paving stones for hell, do 
promises kept to the letter make a smooth roadway 
toward heaven? 

To be a student with eye fixed on the stars, striving 
thus to see God, is better than to watch, for years, with 
unbroken gaze, the outflow from the discharge pipe of an 
oil-well. 



ANTITHESES AND ANALOGIES 213 

Unkept private promises subject their makers and 
breakers to distrust and contempt. Unkept political 
ones have been the chief asset of political parties for a 
quarter of a century. 

Christian Science is a name fixed and definite, and may 
not be turned from its anchorage in a cult. But scientific 
Christianity is quite a different thing, of which our national 
life is in great need. 

Milton wrote: "They also serve who only stand and 
wait." Multitudes of our generation accept it, saying: 
"That sort of service suits me." The Bowery bread-line 
is ample proof. But there are many sons of wealth 
also who are units in a figurative bread-line. 

Benevolence is etymologically the opposite of malevo- 
lence. Generosity has no such opposite; it stands alone. 
An ungenerous person is prone to be a curmudgeon and 
niggardly. A malevolent one is often open-handed in 
some directions, though hate-filled in others. 

Thousands of passengers ride in Pullman coaches rejoic- 
ing in the brilliant electric light, and absolutely uncon- 
scious that the revolving car axle under them makes it. 
Light is thus a by-product of locomotion. Is it possible 
that thought is a like by-product of the motors that move 
our lives? 



214 THE BROADER VISION 



OLD SAYINGS WITH MODERN MEANINGS 

"Truth crushed to earth will rise again"; but un- 
crushed truth has a better chance of making a record for 
height. 

"Of two evils choose the least," is a life-harming fallacy. 
No revelation has ever told which is the least of any or 
all evils. 

"Silence is golden." Sometimes it is a leaden lie, as 
vocal as the universe is wide. 

"Back to Christ!" has been in some quarters a popular 
cry. But the trouble with many a Christian is, he has 
his back to Christ. 

Many persons in our day practice faithfully along the 
line of David's utterance; "Sacrifice and offerings Thou 
didst not desire." 

"God was in Christ reconciling the world unto him- 
self," and Christ was in God sacrificing himself unto the 
world. 

In these days candidates should remember that the 
word "candidate" means "clothed with shining white." 
Pity is it that the Roman garment has so completely 
failed in being a symbol of character. 



MODERN MEANINGS 215 



The Greeks were wont to say: "After the contest 
the crown." The Christ taught, "After the cross: the 
crown." The modern spirit says, "The contest and the 
cross for my father; the crown for me." 

"By faith Abraham" — in a day so long ago that some 
critics say, "Abraham is only an eponym." If we ask, 
"By faith who?" now, will we get answer from a church 
full of eponyms? Or are all the Abrahams dead? 



216 THE BROADER VISION 



KINDLING 

If there were but one sort of temptation there would 
be fewer sinners. 

It is as easy to trust God for the other man as it is 
to see the other man's sins. 

" What is wrong with the Church ? " Nothing. What 
makes its progress so slow ? Its freight. 

Inspiration is a spiritual fire; nothing material lights it. 

A sense of humor is to many a man a safety valve 
against anger. 

Necessity is the mother of invention, but sometimes she 
is unable to dress her children. 

Superstition is the practice of crystallized ignorance. 

Sadness is often the tribute that memory exacts from 
forgetfulness. 

No lesson of history is plainer than this — no man is 
greater than the smallest of his limitations. 

The value of a sermon is not determined by a hearer's 
comments made between his pew and the church door, 
but by his conduct next day. 



KINDLING 217 

Merit is only relative. The standards of palace and of 
prison are very different. "X" may equal "Y," however, 
in the equation expressing relative merit. 

The digger is a great life saver. The shovel and the 
tile are the destroyers of the swamp and the gutter. 

To be sharp as a razor, shrewd as nails, hard as steel, 
and always honest is to be a sincere, truth-loving, God- 
fearing hypocrite. 

Eloquence is not rhetoric, but a torrent whose springs 
are in the recesses of the soul. 

One who walks in the light is wise, if sure that the 
light is not reflected from the moon shining on a marsh. 

To know the truth is to know more than mere facts; 
it is to know the relations of the facts to one another. 

Inclination is the bending of a soul. With the soul as 
with a tree, twig time is the time for bending. 

The act of thinking is pleasant, after custom takes 
away the sense of newness. It is also useful. 

The logical time for a money-maker or a sermon- 
maker to stop is when he has reached his climax. Few 
of either class seem to know it. 



218 THE BROADER VISION 

True worth is the deposit which good life makes in the 
storehouse of character. A man may leave the doors 
of that storehouse wide open without fear. Only his own 
hands can remove or waste the treasure. 

.Expression, impression, repression, depression, suppres- 
sion, — these are etymological illustrations of how the 
essential and the fundamental can be affected by the 
insignificant. 

Sight is the only function of the senses which is applied 
to the action of the mind. When a truth heretofore un- 
comprehended suddenly flashes on a soul, he says: "I 
see it"; never "I hear it," "I touch it, taste it, smell it." 

Courage is seldom, if ever, noisy. It is never bravado. 
It is not a pugilistic virtue. Courage is heart-age, and its 
manifestation is usually as quiet as a pulse-beat. 

New Year resolutions are hardly more worthless, as a 
rule, than those of religious conventions. The first are 
the children of retrospect; the second, of irresponsibility. 

Preachers are not made by seminaries. Lyman 
Beecher never saw a theological seminary, as a student. 
All a seminary can do is to open the door of a man's 
being and let the preacher out. 

The best minister is the one truest to his own manhood, 
and the best manhood is revealed in him who is truest 



KINDLING 219 



minister to life all about him. Phillips Brooks was such 
a minister; John H. Converse displayed such manhood. 

Installation, jubilation, exaltation, fluctuation, depre- 
cation, imprecation, mortification, expostulation, objur- 
gation, dubitation, abdication, non-relation. That is the 
story of many a minister and a congregation. 

Music is the soul's expression of passion or emotion, of 
rapture or delight, of sorrow or joy. Its method is melody 
or harmony; its test is laughter or applause, silence or 
tears. 

Symmetry is better than distortion, goodness is better 
than meanness, truth is better than falsehood, love is 
better than hate. Commonplaces? Oh, yes. But the 
world would be better could we see these better things 
oftener as life's actual commonplaces. 

Prohibition prohibits always where it is unnecessary; 
almost never where it is necessary. When law grips the 
conscience of citizen or community, it becomes effective. 
But an active conscience and a community of which the 
majority is determined to have intoxicants are not boon 
companions. 

Influence is your dynamic in the life of another. In 
that other it is indeed in-fluence. As to yourself, it is 
ef-fluence. "Action and reaction are equal," says the 
physicist. But effluence and influence are not equal. 



220 THE BROADER VISION 

The streams of good and ill out of our lives do not all 
flow into the wells which hearts are. Part of the good is 
wasted on human Saharas. 

Life is a coil of ever rising rings of years, each new one 
a little above the last; or a coil of ever down-going years, 
each succeeding one a little lower than its predecessor. 
Which is your life? If you are consciously ascending you 
are drawing nearer to God and glory with every cycle. 
Do not lament that you have risen no higher. Rejoice 
that you have risen at all. So, year after year, up 
the coil of the years we go, mounting, often on the very 
mistakes we make, toward destiny. 



SPARKS THAT FLY UPWARD 221 



SPARKS THAT FLY UPWARD 

Spirituality is religious magnetism in action. It grips 
the other man. 

Spirituality is an atmosphere. It blows no bugle and 
wears no label. 

Turmoil is not the pleasantest way to peace; but, like 
lightning, it is often God's logic. 

Sin is a debt life cannot pay; Christ's salvation is a 
credit that balances our books. 

The divine that sometimes appears in humanity is a 
fine proof that man was made in the image of God. 

Love may be hurt, may be wounded to death, but it 
can never be made either foe or traitor. 

No real Christian need deny that he is one. He could 
not prove his denial in the face of his life. 

One's relation to Christ is the latitude and longitude 
which fix his place among men. 

The measure of human character is not the opinion of 
others, but the record of one's own consciousness. 



222 THE BROADER VISION 

A shrine at a wayside, by which to kneel and pray, 
serves often to sustain a pilgrim. He is thrice blessed 
who carries wayside and shrine in his heart. 

Age may break strength and loose the grip of the hand 
on life's activities; it cannot break the grip of faith's 
anchor on the Rock of Ages. 

The old theology is not decrepit. Its back is not bent, 
nor do its steps totter. Modernity may not like it, but 
must confess that it is stately. 

Patience under trial is high moral virtue; thankfulness 
under trial because of calm trust in God is Christianity. 

Retrospect is sometimes a vast inspiration. But 
whether it inspire or depress depends on one's attitude. 
When the back look is at mire and pitfalls and jungle, it 
only increases weariness. This is a parable of character. 

A certain rich man said recently: "I have made forty- 
three millionaires." A certain poor old missionary, 
dying, said, "I have turned the New Hebrides from 
cannibalism to Christ." 

Religion, in common acceptation, is the most tremen- 
dous of human assets. Probably that is why the multi- 
tude keep it safely shut away from contamination by 
touch with life. 



SPARKS THAT FLY UPWARD 223 



Tempest and sunshine, storm and calm, are only inci- 
dents of nature. Wreck is followed by beauty, as time 
weaves and spreads her mantle. The pity is, that human 
nature does not always illustrate the same law. 

Peace of heart is the dividend that self-control pays 
to character. Its value is not reckoned in percentages, 
but in the approval of God's representative in a soul — 
the judgment. 

Progressive politics, art, science, education — but no 
progressive Christianity. Jesus reached the end of the 
road with his first step: "Thou shalt love thine enemies." 

"The long, long, weary day," and the longer, wearier 
night that will most surely follow may both become 
avenues along which the feet of patience may bear the 
soul to the touch of the outstretched hand of God. 

Blunders and sins may be equally deplorable for their 
physical effects, but they are vastly different in quality. 
Christ did not come to call blunderers but sinners to 
repentance. 

A man is God's noblest work in creation, and a Chris- 
tian is God's most wonderful achievement in character. 
A man is a unit, alone, uncombined. A Christian is the 
unit plus the Christ. The sum of this combination is 
that divine thing, a saved soul. 



224 THE BROADER VISION 

Faith does not consist in emotion. Emotion is red fire. 
It burns, beautiful but brief. Faith is not an impulse. 
Impulse is a lightning flash. It clears the air and blesses 
sometimes; but its trail is marked by wreck often and 
often. Faith rests in conviction. 

Jesus compared himself to many natural, common 
things. "I am the bread of life"; "I am the water of 
life." He never said of himself what he said of his 
disciples: "Ye are the salt of the earth." Not "I am the 
salt." Salt can, must, in the life with which he was 
familiar, lose its savor. Had he once lost his savor, we 
should have had no Saviour. 

"Rejoice always, and again I say, rejoice." What, 
Paul, always? Yes, I said so. When you have made a 
business blunder, and your friends fall away, and a sudden 
loss sweeps comfort off, and you are defeated in your 
purposes? Yes; just then. What? When your life is 
suddenly cut off from its possibilities, and the man you 
had trusted deceives you and wrecks your hopes, and the 
world tells you it has no more use for you? Yes; just 
then. For God is right where he was all the time. Don't 
make yourself believe the world owes you a living. It 
does not. You owe it decency, morality, integrity, grit, 
indomitability. Brace up, man. Rejoice always. Are 
you thrown to-day, and your clothes torn, and your body 
bruised? Get up, and if you can't get the bruises salved, 
and the tatters mended, tramp right on as you are, rejoic- 
ing that you can go — come out strong, like Mark Tapley. 
You are on "the King's Highway." 



SPARKS THAT FLY UPWARD 225 

The Church at large is threatened with spiritual useless- 
ness on account of an increasing number of nerveless 
Christians. There has never yet been a case of spiritual 
nervous prostration. The more nervously active is the 
Christian spirit, the keener is its zest for work and the 
more marvelous its spiritual power. But there is real 
danger of spiritual decadence. The Church grows in num- 
bers, but statistics prove nothing as to spiritual power. 
Christianity is professed, but too often it is not possessed, 
and a church member without spiritual nerve is no better 

than a jellyfish. 

We have no great fondness for narrow, intolerant, 
fossilized theology; but a man as narrow as the edge of a 
meat-ax, as intolerant as a vicious bull in a field, and as 
fossilized as a troglodyte, is preferable to a flabby, pudgy, 
wabbling-souled Christian. 






226 THE BROADER VISION 



OUR BOOKS 

The man who knows his books, and whom his books 
know, will never be friendless. They have something 
for each mood that sits as guest in his soul. They sing 
to him, touch the fountain of his tears, wake him to 
laughter, wreathe garlands of smiles for him, rouse him 
to nobler purpose, send him chastened to his knees. 

How good it is to hold a book we love. How satisfy- 
ing it is to stand before one's bookshelves and wander 
back in thought through the years where the books lead. 
Here is a row of the finer volumes, lords and ladies of 
their realm. Here is another of old soldiers, worn, bat- 
tered, scarred, wounded, from the mind's battle fields. 
Some cannot stand alone. Some are too crowded for 
comfort. But they bear it all because they love us and 
remember where we have been together. And as for 
ourselves; what do we care for worn bindings and broken 
covers? These are our books. 



EDUCATION 227 



EDUCATION 

Education is not a thing of past, but of present tenses. 
It is e-duc-ing and not e-duc-ed work. It is "drawing 
out " work. Education is drawing a soul out of previously 
existing conditions into such as conform it to its Maker's 
purpose. If education is a thing that can be gotten, and 
that can be finished at any stated period of life, it is no 
better than a bit of personal property. Education is not 
the high art of stuffing a soul with graces and accomplish- 
ments, nor of filling it with knowledge, nor of cramming 
it with ideas. A soul is not a turkey, nor a toy balloon, 
nor a trunk. Stuff the bird with bread crumbs, sage and 
onions; fill the balloon with gas and let it fly to a child's 
delight; cram the trunk with clothes until help must be 
called to shut it; and neither bird, balloon, nor trunk 
has been educated. A precocious child that can repeat 
verbatim the pages of the old-fashioned Andrews & 
Stoddard's Latin grammar, exceptions and all, is not 
necessarily educated. 

Making one learned, imparting culture, causing one to 
know what all social conventions demand, is not educa- 
tion. Evening clothes are not education. If the only 
measure of education is an academic gown and a mortar- 
board cap, men could order the commodity from the 
tailor and estimate it by the quality of the fabric or the 
number of yards used for the gown, or the number of gold 



228 THE BROADER VISION 

tails in the cap's tassel. Education is not a coat of paint; 
not a thing to be laid hold of and made subject to the 
various forms of the verb "to get." To "get religion" 
and to "get an education" are expressions equally absurd. 
Education is a process that begins when the first impulse 
acts on the soul of which the purpose is to fit the soul 
for the thing God had in mind when he made that soul; 
and it continues only as it acts in the direction of such a 
purpose. 



SALVATION BY INCULCATION 229 



SALVATION BY INCULCATION? 

The egg and the soul are inter-relational. The egg 
exists in the world generate. So does a soul. To explain 
the physical chemistry which causes the one, or the spir- 
itual chemistry which causes the other, is impossible, but 
facts are facts. 

The egg, if left to itself, will become degenerate. So 
will a soul. Keep the egg away from contact with eggs, 
especially from bad ones; yet it will degenerate. Sub- 
ject it to warming influences of one sort and another, it 
will degenerate. Let the roosters crow over it and declare 
what a good egg it is, every day. Let the hens cackle 
good elevating cackle over it; let them have quiet hours 
with it every day; let the mother hen set it the sweetest 
example possible; even then, it will degenerate. It is 
so with the soul. When will we learn that morals are 
never taught, but are caught, like measles, and that the 
immorals outclass the morals of the world? Sin potency 
is in the soul. It will degenerate in spite of inculcation. 

An egg can be regenerated. We all know how. So 
can a soul. The processes can be described by the same 
formula. Forces from without must act on each in 
accordance with law. The egg is waked to life by being 
born from above. So is the soul. Jesus said that to 
Nicodemus. It is conversion that saves a soul, not 
inculcation. Grace saves, not inculcation. Regenera- 



230 THE BROADER VISION 

tion saves, not inculcation. That is the law. And for 
regeneration there must be heart throes; sin pangs; 
conscience lashings; floods of penitence; sharp turning 
of a life, born facing out and away from God, squarely 
around upon itself, to face in toward God and to go 
evermore his way. 



NO THOUGHT FOR THE MORROW 231 



NO THOUGHT FOR THE MORROW 

An Anti-Care Prescription 

Life is a thing of the passing day. It is to be measured 
by to-day's doings, and not by worryings over to-morrow. 
What to-day's results will be may not appear until to- 
morrow, but if the work was done as well as we could do 
it, that is enough. Rorrow no trouble from to-morrow. 
Rorrowing is bad business at the best; and trouble is the 
worst thing to borrow of all borrowable things. We 
can do nothing with trouble if we borrow it. It will pay 
no debts of yesterday nor will it buy exemption from 
to-day's duties; and if we borrow we may have to repay 
with compound interest on the day after to-morrow, for 
there is not such another exacting creditor in this world 
as to-morrow. 

A day may not be long enough to enable one to do all 
the work it brings: it is then surely not long enough to 
allow the doing of its work and to-morrow's also. To 
"take time by the forelock" may be a good thing some- 
times, but one should never forget that the old man 
carries a scythe; there is danger that he will swing it and 
cut off the legs of the life that is trying to keep before him 
and lead him. It is safer to let time lead, even though 
he does plod sometimes. 

How can one help taking thought? How can one keep 
from worrying? Can one keep from thinking? Not while 
the mind is alive and awake. Rut we can help "taking 



232 THE BROADER VISION 

thought." To think is one thing; to take thought is 
another. To think is to live; to take thought is to nag 
life. To think is to grow and become powerful; to take 
thought is to fill one's soul with anxiety and foreboding. 
To think is to drive the soul to feeding in God's pasture- 
lands; to take thought for the morrow is to crowd the 
soul through a hedge of thorns, not that it may feed in 
the field which lies beyond, but that it may satisfy itself 
that there will be food there when on some to-morrow it 
shall pass through to that field. Thinking is the act of 
a healthy mind; taking thought is the sign of a mind 
diseased. One can think while resting; strong, pure, help- 
ful thought; one can never rest while taking thought. 
To think is to take care that life shall move as we would 
have it; to take thought is to have care take us in direc- 
tions whither we would not go. To think is the regular 
beating of the pulse of the intellect; to take thought is 
to have that pulse roused to abnormal activity by fevers 
of the soul or by stimulants that are unnatural. Not 
against thinking but against taking thought is the great 
prescription given. Do to-day the deeds of to-day just as 
well as they can be done; leave to-morrow's deeds to it. 
Is not that wise? To-morrow never arrives as to-morrow. 
When it reaches us it is to-day. Do you fear trouble or 
evil to-morrow? Both may be in it, but get to-day's trouble 
out of the way before you begin at to-morrow's. We do 
not believe a living soul would have "the blues" if each 
one of us all would take this anti-care prescription. "The 
blues" are only canned cares. 



AUG 8 1913 



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